


the whole estate of mortal man

by Amiril



Series: Amiril Fic (Not Cover Art) [6]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Bittersweet, Canon Rewrite, Canonical Character Death, Creature Fic, Creature!Silver, M/M, Mutual Pining, drunk snails would move faster, i guess, it wasn't supposed to be a canon rewrite but HERE WE ARE FOLKS, very slow burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 05:31:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 43,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19350493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiril/pseuds/Amiril
Summary: Silver has a limited memory, an unlimited lifespan, and a need for human souls.He spends months trying to buy Flint's.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> HERE WE ARE THEN. Shout out to ellelan for goading me into writing this in the first place, lacecat/@jamesbarlow for helping every time I nearly lost my mind when a small alteration to canon caused a butterfly effect, and annerb for letting me scream in general as I got closer to the deadline. 
> 
> amazing edits by @solomonlittle: ([1](https://runawaymarbles.tumblr.com/post/185833341672/solomonlittle-the-whole-estate-of-mortal-man-by)) ([2](https://runawaymarbles.tumblr.com/post/185831826557/solomonlittle-the-whole-estate-of-mortal-man))

([art by solomonlittle](https://runawaymarbles.tumblr.com/tagged/tweomm)) 

 

John Silver is dying.

He’s no surgeon, but he knows what _too much blood_ feels like, running down his cheek and onto his hands— knows what it looks like trailing behind him from the wound in his leg as he crawls into the storage room.

The door. The latch. Barely past his waist, but higher than he’ll ever reach again. So he props himself against the wall, as best he can, and he hopes someone will come: either a friend to save him, or a pirate to finish the job, because he doesn’t want to die alone and Jesus won’t be coming for him when he does. He didn’t think he’d mind, not being welcomed into the embrace of God, because he wasn’t sure that’s where he was headed and he’s had a few bones of contention with God, over the years, but it would be nice to have something to look forward to, some hope for peace—

Something explodes, and the room shakes.

Blood leaks from his bald patch into his hair.

And someone is standing in the doorway, but it’s neither friend nor pirate.

“You,” John says.

The newcomer closes the door and kneels next to him, cupping John’s face in his hands. They’re young hands. Sailor’s hands. The man has put up a good show of it these last few weeks, but he is neither of those things.

“It’s time,” he says.

John reaches for him. Gets a hand around the man’s wrist, but he doesn’t have the strength or coordination to shove him away. It wouldn’t help matters anyway.

“I didn’t get very long.”

“Well. It wasn’t your own life you asked for.”

No. No it was his little William’s. John had held his pox-covered body and told him he’d make it better, and then he had.

Perhaps this is what he gets. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. God knows what he did, and he’s being punished.

But he’d do it again.

He’d do _everything_ again.

“It hurts,” John says, trying to keep down a scream.

“I know.” The man’s hands tighten around his face, cool against his skin. Heedless of the blood dripping in between his fingers. “You can let go.”

The ship rocks again, and footsteps clatter just outside.

 _The pirates are here,_ John thinks.

It’s his last thought.

The eyes of the man next to him go flat and empty, and his mouth opens to reveal a seemingly endless nothingness where teeth and tongue and throat should be.

 

 

When Mr. Gates and Joshua break down the door, they see a young man with his hands in the air, standing next to a body.

“My name is John Silver,” he says, “and I happen to be a very good cook.”


	2. Chapter One

 

i.

Silver.

John Silver.

He’s heard the name many times, but he only now considers it as his own.

Silver like the glow of souls as they leave the body, silver like the words he uses to coax them out. Using the name had been the cook’s instinct, strongest in those first few minutes— but now that things are more settled, he can rationalize it.

John Silver will be the name of the cook if they check the ship’s log, and it is much safer to be a cook than a fighter.

He can be Silver.

Here, as a new man, in this new place.

He had followed the cook onto Parrish’s ship after one too many nights in a pub, hearing stories of turquoise seas, mermaids and sandy beaches. England had seemed barren, all dirty hands and empty hills, and he’d had an image— maybe a memory, maybe a story— of somewhere warmer. And since John had been his only standing contract at the time, it made sense not to let him get too far.

Now, John will never be far again. Silver can feel him around his rib cage, can reach the fragments of memory that stuck on his way down.

A baby. The curve of another man’s cheek. An apple tree behind a fence. The smell of meat.

Hopefully, knowledge of cooking is somewhere in him as well. If not, it might be safer to abandon this crew when they reach a pirate port. He’ll be able to find somewhere else to go— those who rule society, and those who live outside it, tend to be the most desperate, and he’s had enough of the first group for the time being. Maybe for a whole lifetime.

He’ll go back to kings as soon as he forgets why he left.

“Sails!” comes the shout, and Silver follows the pirates back to their own ship.

Parrish’s burns behind them.

 

ii.

The captain stands on the deck, a book held high in his hands.

“You may have heard our haul was slight,” he says with a voice like he’s commanding a cavalry. “That it wasn’t worth the loss on our side. That the last few months have been born of weakness. But that is not the case.”

Something is growing in the murmur between men.

“The truth is—” and here the captain turns, like he’s trying to make eye contact with every man on board— “The truth is that you and I have been on the trail of a prize so rich it could upset the very nature of our world. And for that reason, I felt it necessary to keep it a secret. I didn’t want any of the other crews to try to steal it from us. To steal it from you.”

From the twist of his mouth and the knowing glances thrown around, Silver thinks he means someone specific.

“Told you, didn’t I,” the man next to him mutters, elbowing another.

“Ssh! I’m listenin’.”

“But that silence ends today— because with the capture of this ship, we finally have the information that we need.”

With all the attention on the captain and none on Silver, he lets his eyes shift. Looks at the captain, and  _sees_ him: a soul alight with purpose and ambition and longing so intense that Silver wants to look away.

He doesn’t.

“I’m not just gonna make you rich,” he’s saying. “I’m not just gonna make you strong. I’m gonna make you the princes of the New World!”

There’s something familiar building up in all the men. They’re stomping, chanting _Flint, Flint—_ warship forgotten behind them, dangers ahead discounted. They want with the passion of someone who hadn’t known there was something _to_  want a moment ago, and now can’t imagine living without it. They want and they want, and in the middle of it stands Flint, who wants something else entirely.

 _I want that,_ Silver thinks.

He wants to know what Flint’s soul will do when it leaves him, he wants to know what it will feel like when Silver takes it in. He wants to know what secrets it’s hiding, and he wants to know what it will allow him to become.

He was right, before.

This is the place for him.

 

iii.

Odds are good that he’s had sex before, but he can’t remember it.

As a rule, he does not focus on what he can’t remember: his memories get fuzzy, as souls wear out. All he has before the seventeenth century are faint impressions: there is no order imposed on them. No kind of sense. No indication if they are his own, or the left behind traces of a forgotten soul.

There’s no reason to dwell on it. What matters is now, and today, and tomorrow.

But if he’s had sex before, then maybe he’s already learned how to cover his eyes. How to get that close to someone without accidentally seeing their soul, seeing hopes and fears and apathy all rolled into the woman on top of him. He’s always seen more, with physical contact, and now he’s closer to these women than he’s been to anyone in a long time— and while he isn’t sure it feels like _sex_ the way others remember it, it’s nice and it’s warm and it's grounding and it’s not hard to get his body to produce what he thinks is the expected response.

Half an hour later, there’s only one woman left in the room. She’s pulling her robe back on, but her eyes are on Silver.

“What are you?” she asks.

“That’s not very polite.” Silver sits up slowly, checking to make sure his body still looks as it did before. He thinks he looks normal, but it's been a while since he's had a chance to do a comparison. “What do you mean, what am I?”

“I mean now you have eyes and a mouth and a tongue when a moment ago they were nothing but smoke.”

Lovely.

Silver rolls his neck. All muscles still accounted for, as well— but if sex is going to cause him to reveal himself, he probably shouldn’t have any more of it. It will be a moot point anyway, if the women in here go telling everyone what they saw, and he gets run off the island.

It would be a shame. He kind of wanted some of that gold.

He definitely wants the captain’s soul.

“Are you sure you saw what you thought you saw?”

“I am.” She approaches him slowly, the way Solomon Little had once approached a sick dog he wasn’t sure if he’d have to shoot. “What are you?”

Silver looks at her with his own eyes. Lets the lines and colors of the physical world fall away into shapes and souls. She’s hungry, this girl. Looking for happiness, and safety, and love. The same human things. Nothing remarkable. Nothing repulsive.

“I am someone who makes wishes come true,” he says, reopening human eyes. She’s unsettled, that’s obvious— but most people are. “For a price.” He’d come here looking for investments, hadn’t he? Perhaps this is the best way to go about it.

She isn’t running and screaming yet, at any rate. “What is that price?”

“Your soul.” He gives her his most winsome smile. It doesn’t appear to work. “Not destined for Hell, or torment. Just a little bit up front, enough to grant your wish, and another small piece for me. When you die, I'll collect the rest." 

“And what happens to a person who lives while missing part of their soul?”

War. Death. Ordinary life. “It depends on the person. It depends on what they wanted. The more they ask for, the more they lose.”

Her eyes are darting from his eyes to his mouth to the door and back again, and she moves even closer. “What about a different arrangement?” her voice drops, hand going to Silver’s knee. “You clearly can’t walk around offering your services to everyone on this island, or you wouldn’t bother to hide. I can tell you who might be receptive.”

“And in exchange?”

Now, the woman is the one who smiles. “You can owe me.”

He offers her a hand, and she takes it.

 

 

iv.

The woman— Max— is quite a source of information. Silver should have bothered to find the brothels earlier.

She hasn’t put a contract in his path yet, but he now knows of several people who should be avoided at all costs, and has a reasonable understanding of the power structure on the island. Certainly enough information to know what it looks like when the _Ranger_ crew is up to no good.

He’d been following Flint. Because if Max can be his eyes in town, well, that gives Silver time to plan how he’s going to catch this one. So he’d seen Flint go by on a horse, and he’d seen men creeping along a few minutes later.

No one is going to be tracking Flint at this hour with good intentions.

Silver certainly isn’t.

His physical form takes time and energy to change, but not that much to maintain. With the effort and concentration of squeezing his eyes shut, he lets it fade, just a little. Enough to turn into the shadows, to be faster as he circles just ahead of the pursuit.

There are three of them: a large bald man who seems to be in charge, or is at least leading the way. Behind him are two others, walking with their heads down, feet scuffling on the dirt road. Their souls are unremarkable— just men, the same as and different from every other. The bald one is hungry, has always been hungry: for gold, for respect, for flesh. He swings his blade as he walks.

Surely if Vane and his quartermaster wanted to kill Flint, they’d send more than three men.

Silver fades more and drifts closer, barely a shadow in the darkness.

It will have taken Flint a fraction of the time to cover this ground on horseback than it will take these on foot. How far do they think he’s gone? Or is he up ahead somewhere, lying in wait?

 _"In prime of years, when I was young, I took delight in youthful toys,_ ” the shortest man sings, just barely over his breath. _“Not knowing then what did belong—_ ”

“Stuff it,” the middle one hisses.

“Stuff yourself, Roll. There’s no one around to hear—”

“ _Hamund and me_ can hear, you sing like a bird getting strangled—”

“ _Unto the pleasures of those days,_ ” he sings, a little louder. “ _At seven years old I was a child—_ ”

“Shut. _Up._ ” This time it’s the bald man who speaks. Hamund. “He hears us coming, we’re dead.”

“But it keeps playing in my head. I can’t get it out ‘less I sing it.” 

“Slade. Do I look like I give a fuck what’s in your head?”

Slade huffs, but they walk in silence for at least another mile.

There’s a certain stillness to the night, the farther they get from the constant movement of Nassau town. Here, the moon shows them a quiet path, even as the grasses move and the branches whisper. There are sugar fields somewhere around here, Max had told him, run by men with whips who would prefer to see the pirates gone. But wherever they are, they have yet to pass them.

“Is that the house?” Slade asks after a while, pointing. There’s a candle lit in the window of the building in question, and a woman can be seen reading inside. She turns a page, and the candle flickers, as though a breeze went by. 

“That’s a woman’s house,” Hamund says.

“I heard he lives with a woman. A witch.”

“A what?”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” says Roll.

“I heard it. I heard it from someone on his own crew, that he goes into battle blessed by a witch.”

“Rackham wouldn’t have sent us here to get killed by a witch.”

“Shut it.” Hamund starts patting his pockets. “We’ll just wait here, and, look—” he brandishes a spyglass, pointing it seemingly at random in the dark. “See, there’s a man in there. Looks like Flint.”

The spyglass can’t be doing anything to help him: they can all see the man. Vane’s men by squinting through the window, and Silver— well. Silver knows that soul, even if he’s only seen it a few times before.

“We wait ‘till he’s asleep, then we grab the book,” Slade says. “No need to wake up the witch.”

“Well where the fuck is the book? What if he keeps it under his pillow?”

“We’ll be _quiet.”_

If they steal it, Flint might be willing quite a lot to get it back. He wants the gold with a desperation that isn’t quite greed, so maybe it will be enough for him to turn to Silver, if he knows the option is there.

Or maybe these men will kill him in a botched attempt, and his soul will be out of Silver’s reach forever.

The _Ranger_ men settle in, lying quiet in the yard. Flint and the woman move from the main room to the back of the house.  And Silver circles around to the front, quiet and formless in the dark.

 

 

v.

No matter how insubstantial Silver allows himself to become, he can’t pass through solid wall. What he can do is squeeze parts of his body through very small spaces: getting a couple fingers in between the door, the wall, and the latch isn’t comfortable, but he's able to flick it open. Able to crack open the door and slip inside, bringing his body back together with a sigh of relief. He likes being solid. He likes being real.

The house, from what he can see in the dark, isn’t much. It’s small. Cozy, perhaps. Table, chair, cups. Earthy walls covered in years of human care.

What does it mean, that Flint has this place? That he secrets himself away here, while the rest of his men stay on the beach or at the inn?

Silver ducks below the window and approaches the bedroom. The trick is to announce his presence without getting murdered, or without causing such a racket that the men outside will know something’s amiss.

Nothing for it, then.

A few years ago, he woke up a tired Stuart matriarch to give her bad news, and this can’t be worse than that. So he clears his throat, leans against the door, and hisses, “Flint!”

Nothing but silence comes from the bedroom.

“Flint!” he calls a little louder, gently tapping. “Wake up!”

He is a timeless entity. He should not be wary of opening a door.

Though he’s also a timeless entity who has never lost a limb, and he doesn’t particularly care to start now.

He’ll blame the cook for that fear. Cowardly bastard. So afraid of what he loved that he started down the path towards selling his soul, towards dying with no friends and far from home. Fuck that.

Silver opens the door, and puts his hands in the air.

The fact that Flint is wearing a nightshirt, pants, and no trousers, does nothing to make him less intimidating. The way the lantern is reflecting off his pistol might be making up the difference.

“Don’t shoot!” Silver hisses, pressing backwards into the shadows and carefully preparing to get shot. “I’m here to warn you!”

“Who the fuck are you?” Flint demands.

“It’s Silver!”

“Who?”

“Silver!” No recognition. “The cook. On your ship.”

“...Since when?”

“Since last week, I sailed with Parrish, there are men after you, will you please put the gun down?”

“James,” the woman says. Silver had almost missed her in the blankets, but now that he can look away from the pistol, he doesn’t miss the knife she’s holding. Do they sleep with weapons next to the bed all the time, or did they know something was wrong?

Maybe that’s just what everyone does, here. Maybe Silver should start. He doesn’t even own a weapon. He should do something about that. Maybe learn to fire a pistol. 

“What are you warning us of?” The woman moves into the candlelight, even as Flint reaches out with his other arm to hold her back.

“Three men from Vane’s crew are here to steal the logbook. They’re hiding outside.”

Flint doesn’t lower his weapon, but he does glance towards the bedroom window, as if he’ll be able to confirm this through the flat darkness. “You know this because?”

“I saw them. I followed them.”

They consider each other for a moment. And then Flint moves, crossing the room in two, three steps, and Silver is pinned against the door frame, an arm heavy against his throat.

“One wrong move,” Flint says, “and I’ll cut your throat.”

“Alright.”

It seems like a soul like this should be visible, up close like this, lurking somewhere behind his eyes. Even when Silver isn’t looking for it. But it’s too dark to see much, to feel anything but the breath of an angry silhouette until Flint steps away.

Around them, the house is quiet. Someone in Silver— he thinks it’s Solomon Little, but he isn’t sure anymore— was so deeply afraid of the quiet that it’s set prickles up Silver’s neck ever since.

Poor, poor Solomon. He’ll be gone soon. It’s not until Silver looks back that he realizes how many days are slipping out of his memory: someone had mentioned Ulster yesterday, and without knowing why, he’d tasted blood.

“You’re said it was men?”

“Three of them,” Silver says, trying not to look shaken.

“Anne Bonny wasn’t with them?”

“Not unless it was a very good disguise.”

“Hm.” Flint looks at the woman, and whatever passes between them isn't something that Silver can see like this. 

Outside, footsteps shuffle.

“Miranda,” Flint says quietly. She nods, taking his pistol and position at the door. The barrel still points at Silver.

“So much for trust,” Silver mutters.

Flint steps past him into the hall. “You’re still breathing.”

He’s not, but he remembers to start again. He likes breathing. The rhythm of it.

The front door opens.

For big men, they do a good job of moving quietly. Silver can only just see Hamund’s outline in the faint moonlight, and Slade and Roll are almost invisible. It’s far too dark for anyone to see Silver’s eyes, so he looks at their souls instead, bright against the black. Flint, simmering anger. Miranda, corroded around the edges like salt on metal.

The three intruders make it just past the kitchen table, and Flint pounces.

He gets Hamund by the head and slams him into the table with an accuracy that Silver would find interesting if he wasn’t distracted by Slade charging towards him. Silver ducks, and he thought he’d knock Slade over around his feet, but instead Miranda fires, and Silver goes near incorporeal for a moment with the surprise of it. Slade falls, cursing— not dead, but not getting up— and it’s enough for Silver to feel around his hands, retrieving his cutlass from one of them, before pulling his pistol out of his belt for good measure.

“Fuck, fuck, motherfucker.” Slade presses a hand against his shoulder, and for a moment Silver is looking through John’s eyes, dying in the storage room—

“Ropes,” Flint says. He’s standing over the other two men, arms out, holding something.

“You’re not just going to kill them?” Silver asks.

“No. Ropes?”

Silver has no idea where the fuck ropes are, but Miranda moves, and Silver kneels over Slade alone.

“Witch,” Slade mutters.

“Hmm.” Miranda returns from the corner, holding some ropes and a lantern, and Silver looks back at the human world. “I do hope you’re not planning on leaving them in my house,” she says, flicking her hair over her shoulder so that it doesn’t trail in Roll’s blood as she secures him. “It might just be easier to bury them in the back yard.”

Flint crouches in front of Hamund and loops the rope around his arms. “Try anything, and I’ll listen to her.”

To his credit, Hamund spits at his feet. But he also doesn’t take his eyes off Miranda, although whether it’s her supposed witchcraft, her nightgown, or her knife drawing his attention, Silver can’t say.

Slade whimpers when Flint turns to him, getting louder when Flint puts a hand on his wounded shoulder in a gesture that might almost look caring, were it anyone else.

“Who sent you?” he asks, voice sharper than the blade he’s picked up. “I’m not going to ask twice.”

“We ain’t telling you _shit_ _,_ ” Hamund snarls.

Flint squeezes Slade’s shoulder, and Slade’s face twists— Silver isn’t sure how he’s supposed to talk, if he’s screaming, but he manages. “The— the captain.”

“Fucker.”

Miranda presses the barrel of her pistol against Hamund’s head, and he goes quiet again.

“Vane?” Flint asks, and Slade nods. “To steal the logbook?” Another nod. “How did you know where I was?”

“We knew you were going to the interior, Jack paid a woman, a farmer’s wife, to tell us, then we followed you to the house, please let go, _please—_ _”_

“James.”

Flint lets go, rubbing one bloody palm against the back of his other hand.

 

 

vi.

Miranda rides the horse. Their three trussed up prisoners get to lie in a pile in the bottom of the cart. Flint stands over them, now fully dressed, and Silver presses his knees to his shoulders and tries to be glad they’re not making him walk.

“You’re welcome,” he says at one point.

Flint ignores him.

There’s still a song, caught in Slade’s soul. Silver watches it loop through him until it’s stuck in his own head as well.

He’s lost track of how long it is until sunrise, but it’s still dark when they stop outside the tavern. Flint bangs on the door, starting two men who have fallen asleep on the stoop— they wander off, muttering profanities. 

A scruffy-looking man opens the door, lantern held aloft and eyes only half open. “Wut?”

“We need to see Miss Guthrie,” Flint says. “And I need someone to guard these three.” He points over his shoulder with his thumb, and the man glances up before nodding, chin wobbling as he represses a yawn.

“Yeah, go on then. She’s already up.”

Flint doesn’t tell Silver and Miranda to come with him, but he sort of jerks his head towards the door, like he’s forgotten that they aren’t his men used to following wordless commands. That one seems clear enough, though, and Silver is just as happy to not be left standing out here, so he follows.

He didn’t know Guthrie’s tavern was ever this quiet, but it appears even pirates have their limits. Or at least the owners do. The floor creaks under them, and a fallen cup rolls across the floor. Silver tries not to jump.

There’s already tension in the back room when they enter it.

The woman— who must be Eleanor Guthrie— looks as though she’s halfway through dressing, wearing a respectable skirt but with her hair down. An African man with scars on his face stands next to her, hands twisted together behind his back. Scott, Max said his name was.

They swing around when Flint, Silver and Miranda enter.

“What the fuck?”

Flint looks between them, clearly picking up on the same thing Silver is: people don’t just stand around at this hour for no reason, after all. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Eleanor crosses her arms, looking as though she’d rather be spreading them out over some kind of mess and screaming _nothing to see here!_  There’s obviously something to see here, and Silver takes a step back, letting his eyes go dark. Mr. Scott is heavy with secrets and aches, but Eleanor— she’s bright, and she’s angry. Desperate.

 _Easy mark,_ Silver thinks.

“Why are you here?” Scott asks. “It is late.”

“We were woken from our sleep by Vane’s men, breaking into our house to steal the logbook with the _Urca_ _’_ s schedule. They can confirm the story— I’ve left them outside with O’Malley.”

“We?” asks Eleanor, at the same time the man says, “Your _house?_ ”

“My house.” Miranda takes a step forward, casting a long shadow on the wall. “Mr. Silver here came to warn us. He barely got there in time.”

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

“Miranda Barlow.” Her politeness is so extreme that it nearly veers into mockery. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.”

“We were able to overwhelm them and bring them here,” Flint says. “So they could tell you, and the rest of the island, the same story. That Charles Vane is sending his men to steal from other captains, because he’s too weak to go find his own prizes.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Eleanor presses a hand to her forehead, turning away. “This is the last thing I need tonight.”

“Yes.” Flint drags out the word, looking between Flint and Scott. “What exactly is going on here?”

“That’s not—” Scott starts, but Eleanor interrupts him.

“A messenger just brought word from Harbor Island that my father was arrested,” she says. “So, congratulations. Your treasure galleon plan is the only one we’ve got.”

 

 

vii.

Silver rests his chin in his hands, letting his knuckles dig into his cheeks. He can feel the skin dent, as it tries so hard to keep pretending that it’s real skin— if he pushed harder, he could stick his hand all the way through his face.

Let Slade scream _witchcraft_ then.

But he won’t. Instead he focuses, until his cheek is so hard he can’t dent it at all.

At his feet, Slade and Hamund snore.

“Clearly,” Silver tells Roll, “my time is well spent, as you’re all seconds from escape.”

Roll glares at him, grunting through his gag.

“Well, O’Malley had to piss, and the captain has better things to do than look after you lot till morning. So you get me. Lucky you.” O’Malley had cleaned their injuries a bit, which is more than Flint would have done. They really are in better hands, even if they’ve been shoved into a pile in the corner of a tavern.

What is to be done with them come morning, Silver can’t say. What he _wants_ to say is, _I_ _could get you out of this, I could heal all your injuries, I could give you a successful future,_ but such an offer must be approached with caution, and not when—

“Silver!” O’Malley stops next to him, taking the rifle back. “Mistress Guthrie wants a word.”

“Right. Talk to you later, then.” He gets off the stool and reenters Eleanor's office, trying to look as non-threatening as possible. “Can I help you?”

“I don’t know.” She’s standing alone by the window, arms still crossed, fingers tapping on her elbow. Scott is nowhere in sight. “Max says you’re not human. That you make things happen.”

Or perhaps they don’t have to be approached with caution at all.

Silver closes the door.

“Yes.”

“What are you?”

He hadn’t expected this. Not yet. But he thinks he’ll grow to like her, so Silver looks again to her soul. Opens his mouth to reveal the void inside when he speaks.

“Whatever you need.”

She nods, as though this is expected.

“Max says the more you ask for, the more of your soul you stand to lose.”

“Yes.”

Eleanor turns away from the window, pouring herself a drink from a bottle on the sill. She does not offer any to Silver. “All of what I am goes to this place. It doesn’t matter what I lose.”

Far be it from Silver to talk anyone out of an impulsive decision made in the middle of the night after hearing bad news. But. “It might matter,” he says. “This is the kind of thing you can’t take back.”

“Yes.” At least half the cup goes in one swallow. “It doesn’t mean I go to Hell, right? Not that that’s a deal breaker. That’s where we’re all going, here.”

“No. You won’t go to Hell.” Silver sits down on the edge of the desk, wondering if she'll tell him to move. She doesn't. “When you die, I’ll come and collect your soul. Part of you will become me, for a few decades, until it’s all used up. You’ll become nothing— no being reborn as a baby or a tree, no Heaven, no Hell. If that matters to you.”

She scoffs a little. “Why would that matter to me?”

It matters to some people. Especially in the moment of their death, it matters very much to some people.

“I’ll also warn you that you can’t wish for everything. You have to choose something specific, something that you want enough to put your sole focus on.”

Shrugging again, Eleanor pours herself some more of whatever is in the bottle. “Do you know what happened when Admiral Henry Morgan was arrested? He was sent home to England in chains for violating the peace with Spain. And then they made him the governor of Jamaica. Either my father will get himself the same position, or he’ll be thrown in prison. The Navy will come to Nassau. Either way, I stand to lose everything— at best, I’ll get sent to Philadelphia, to marry some nice, stupid man and have nice, stupid children until one of them kills me on the way out.” She stops just long enough for another swallow. “I _need_ Nassau, do you understand?”

“Alright,” Silver says. “Sit down.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“It’s easier if you sit.”

She drops into her chair, slouching more than sitting. She’s trying— her soul is calloused from how hard she’s been trying. She hardly has to focus on what she wants for Silver to see it: Nassau, control that the British can’t take away from her. Power. Importance.

Despite, or perhaps because of, what everyone must have told her for her entire life, she wants nothing more in the world than to matter. Not out of malice, and only a little bit out of spite. She’s sowed so much of herself in the ground here that she needs to see it grow into something.

To think that Silver had thought he was done with kings.

He reaches out, with a hand that is nowhere near human, curling his fingers near her chest. The piece of soul he beckons out is hot with wanting, and he holds it in his hands for a moment.

_Eleanor Guthrie is to keep Nassau for the rest of her life._

When he claps his hands together, the piece of soul splits apart, spreading in all directions. It will just barely cover the town, lingering as long as she does.

Silver doesn’t feel nausea, but this is the closest thing to it: that moment after, as if he’s just run hundreds of miles, everything he is becoming empty and hollow. He reaches back on instinct, calling for the nearest bit of soul— it detaches from Eleanor’s chest, disappearing into Silver’s mouth, and the feeling fades.

 _Hullo,_ he thinks, to the fragment of Eleanor Guthrie that is now him. The fragment that will tell him where she is, and if she’s alive, and pave the way for the rest of her soul to settle peacefully when the time comes.

It rattles about for a moment in confusion— Silver gets a flash of Max’s face, the feeling of a woman’s hands brushing her hair, a little dark-skinned girl holding a doll— before it settles. They’re mostly unobtrusive, the live ones.

“Is that it?” Eleanor asks.

Silver looks up from the gaping hole in her soul, and back to her skin and face and the room.

“That’s it,” he says.

Long live the king.

 

 

viii.

By the time any of the taverns open the next morning, everyone on the island knows that Charles Vane tried to steal from another crew.

“That just ain’t right,” says the blacksmith’s assistant to the bawd as he hands over his coins. “Just ain’t right.”

“Of course, we’re all thieves here,” says a man already on his third mug of rum, “but we’re all brothers under the black, isn’t that what we say? We don’t steal from each other, especially not at night like that.”

“They would have gotten away, except for the witch,” mutters Mr. Turk, giving Silver a very suspicious look. “She saved him, and cursed _them_ , you mark my words.”

Silver delivers these comments to Flint along with a piece of pork. “You,” he says, “are either the luckiest sunnuvabitch I’ve ever met, or you’re a genius.” Silver is both of those things as well: being a cook might have been the best decision he’s made since he set foot on a ship. No one is asking him to climb and scrape barnacles, and that is worth standing next to the fire, ignoring the part of him that was once Jonathan ben Samuel, and cooking a pig.

Flint raises an eyebrow, putting one hand protectively over the logbook. “How’s that?”

“I didn’t tell anyone what happened last night. I doubt Mrs. Barlow told anyone what happened last night. And now, less than twelve hours later, not only does the whole island know what happened, but your biggest rival has been abandoned by most of his crew. Not only _that_ , but I heard they were looking for Gates to be their new captain— to sail with us in consort, stronger and better armed than the _Lion._ Couldn’t have ended up better.”

“Interesting,” Flint says. “And what role are you playing in this story?”

“Me?”

“There are no whispers about the man who somehow followed Vane’s best hunters undetected? Who entered Mrs. Barlow’s house in dead silence, as though a locked door presented no obstacle?”

Silver grits his teeth. There have been rumors, and he has made a show of laughing them off. “Really, Captain. Far greater men than you have forgotten to lock their doors on occasion. Especially in the passion of a reunion.” That’s what he would think, at any rate, if he hadn’t seen Flint and Miranda’s souls together. There is love, but he doubts it’s the kind of love he’s implied. They’re too hardened around each other for that. “You have an odd way of showing gratitude to a man who might have saved your life.”

Flint’s lip curls. “You don’t think I could have taken three of Vane’s men in my sleep?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know. I’m just a cook.”

Whatever Flint was going to say is interrupted by Singleton’s angry bellow as he stomps over.

“We’ve all got the fucking shits!” he yells, breath closer to Silver’s face than he’d ever like to experience again. “Wait. What the fuck are you two talking about?”

“I was just complimenting Mr. Silver on his cooking,” Flint says, without hesitating. “There’s been an illness going around. Perhaps if you spent less time at Mr. Noonan’s, you would find yourself less susceptible.”

“We can’t all have sweet Puritan things to warm our beds at night.”

Flint stands. Singleton’s knee twitches, the urge to not back down clearly at odds with the need to not shit his pants in public. The second desire wins, and he’s off again, walk a mixture between a stride and a waddle as he makes for the shit tent. Flint watches him go for a moment before taking a cautious nibble of the offending pork.

And promptly spitting it into the sand. “Jesus, have you ever eaten a pig in your life?”

“No.” Silver shouldn’t be offended. But he is, a bit. “The men seemed to think it was done.”

“They’d eat it raw, if you let them. What do you mean, you’ve never eaten pork?”

“My father was a Hebrew. Wouldn’t touch the stuff. Never could bring myself to, either.”

“Huh.” It’s impossible to tell whether Flint believes him. “Get another pig. And do exactly as I say.”

“Right.” At least he’s off the topic of Silver’s lock-picking abilities. He nods to the path Singleton had left in the sand. “Do you have a plan to deal with that?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“It’s not, I suppose. Aside from the fact that he stands between me and a large amount of gold.” He’s been really growing attached to the gold, as a concept. He can blame John for that, perhaps, or a couple of the Stuarts: or maybe it’s just practical. Having gold means getting access, getting access means finding souls. Having gold means freedom—

_There you are, Eleanor._

“Though I’m sure he’s not your only threat. Morely and Billy have been in conversation all morning. Miranda’s name came up a few times.”

Flint frowns.

Silver smiles.

 

 

ix.

“Hey.” Silver tosses a coin to the fiddler. “Do you know _T_ _he Ages of Man?_ ”

The fiddler nods, starting the tune, and Silver sits down at one of the tables. He’s down to his last bit of money, but he can stretch a penny for a long time. Not needing to eat or sleep much goes a long, long way.

 _“At three times seven, I went a’wild, and manhood led me to be bold,”_ the fiddler sings, thrusting his hips out on the last bit to general applause. Silver is just raising his hands to clap when Max stops in front of him, striking a pose that would look seductive to anyone else.

“Why Eleanor?”

“Sorry?”

“Hundreds of greedy, desperate people on this island you could feast on. I was trying to find you some. Why Eleanor?”

_“My own conceit it so me told—”_

“I didn’t realize anyone was off limits.” Something in Silver’s side is twinging. “She approached me, said you told her.”

“I did.” Max sits down in the chair across from him. Her face is neutral, but there’s a defeated slump to her shoulders. “I warned her to stay away from you.”

“What happened?”

“You have a piece of her soul now, right? Do you not know?”

“No.” He resists the urge to put a hand where his ribs would be, where Eleanor has taken up residence. “When I look at someone’s soul, I don’t see thoughts. I see— emotions. Instincts. Things that are integral to who they are. I can see enough to know that something has happened, but I don’t know what. It was that bad?”

Max clenches her jaw, looking across the room to where Captain Hallendale is walking off with one of the girls.

 _“At four times seven I must take a wife, and leave off all my wanton ways,”_ the fiddler sings, to another chorus of hoots.

“I knew when I first saw her that she wasn’t right,” Max says. “I thought maybe it was the stress. I asked her to leave the island, but she would rather be broken here than free with me.”

Ah.

“Are you leaving, then?”

“I thought about it. But I don’t have enough money to make it as far as I’d like.” She taps her thumbs together, watching where Rackham is sitting in the corner. “No. I am here. The sand is shifting under our feet, and I should make the most of it, should I not? It’s what Eleanor is doing.”

“It’s certainly what Rackham is doing. Since when does he run a brothel?” The last Silver had heard of him, which was literally two days ago, he was a sneak who had sent men to rob Flint, rob Silver and the crew, of their gold. Last Silver had heard of him, he wasn’t worthy to swab a toilet.

Max rolls her eyes. “Since he, Vane and Bonny arrived here with a note they claimed was written by Noonan, signing over the place. Noonan left for Port Royal, or so they say.”

They must have tripled the bawd’s pay. “Do you think if you kill a man in Port Royal, you say he’s gone to Nassau?”

“I’d say Tortuga. And stop looking at Jack. He’s not a good option.”

Silver looks away from Jack. “Are you sure? He seems rather ambitious.”

“Far too obsessed with his own intelligence. He wants a name. Wants a legacy.” She says it like it’s more than just a word. “He couldn’t live with himself if he thought he got it through a cheat.”

“No one would know.”

“He would.” But Max is watching Rackham as well. “Do you—”

Behind them, the door crashes open, throwing the fiddler off his beat. “ _Walrus_ men!” Gates bellows. “Get your asses out here!”

“That’s you,” Max says, when Silver doesn’t move.

 

 

x.

Silver hates watching men die.

He hates seeing their souls, flare of their last thoughts. The ones that take their time with it are the worst, all pain and fear drowning in the voices of their mothers, brothers, children, lovers. It’s hard not to see that as a loss of potential, and perhaps that makes him greedy.

But the guns fire and the men fall, and they board the _Andromache._

And the guns fire.

And the men fall.

They give Lars a grenade, and his fear is so tangled up with anger and despair that Silver grabs Flint’s arm.

“Send me,” he says.

Flint just looks at him. “What?”

“You want a man to sneak through the dark, you want to send me.” And the captain can’t argue with that, not after the other night.

“Alright.” He agrees so fast it’s almost an insult. “The cook has volunteered to go. Lars, be ready to make a second attempt.”

Asshole. Silver makes sure Flint is looking at him when he shifts his gaze to Flint’s soul. Lets his eyes be empty for a moment— just long enough to make Flint question what he saw. Just enough to make him wonder.

Just long enough to give Silver another good look. He’s walking into danger, after all.

“Randall, be ready to start cooking again,” Logan says, and Billy smacks him.

Silver takes the grenade and drops below the deck.

He hates watching men die. But now, for one soul, he’s going to help kill more.

 _They’ll die anyway,_ he tells himself as he turns into as much smoke and shadow as he can while still holding the grenade.

There once was a man named Kayode, and his hatred of slavers keeps Silver walking.

He kneels behind a post and lights the grenade.

Tosses it. A shooting star in the dark.

First comes the explosion, the kind that had thrown shrapnel through John Silver’s leg and dashed his head against a table in the mess. And after that come the shots, over and over through the hole that’s been torn in the doors. Shots that killed Jonathan, and most of his town—

Silver becomes just smoke enough to let the bullets pass through him, and makes for the exit.

 

 

xi.

“There’s a hole there,” he tells Gates and Billy. “I killed at least one, injured one other, but it didn’t blow the whole wall in and now they just have a place to shoot from.”

Billy picks at Silver’s shirt, at a tear a bullet made as it went through. “You were nearly hit.”

“I got lucky.”

Lars would have been dead before he lit the grenade. He’s leaning against the rail now, point at something on the _Andromache’s_ hull.

“Captain!”

 

 

xii.

The explosion throws Lars’s charred body at Silver’s feet. The song caught in his soul catches in Silver’s ear for a moment before vanishing, and he thinks, _what was the point?_

They flee the _Scarborough_ , and Flint shouts, “Man overboard!”

Silver watches the light of Billy’s soul drift in the sea behind them.

 

 

xiii.

He wishes he could drink.

He likes the motion of it, wants burn that men have described. The softening of the world. The social pause.

He’s held a mug, held it to his mouth, but he can’t swallow. The rum would just clatter around his empty body until he shook it out, or until he became insubstantial enough that it pooled at his feet.

Odd, this flesh. False flesh. Easily manipulated. It’s not real, and yet when Flint sits down across from him, it warms. As though it recognizes his soul.

His soul that’s so bright, still reaching for the sky, and yet, and yet—

“We’re selling them?” Silver asks.

Flint lifts a shoulder. “Taking away money the men feel they’ve earned is not going to help me stay on top of the mutiny Singleton thinks I don’t know about.”

“They’re the reason we could take the ship,” he says, as though it matters. “And they were scared. Olabode just wants to go home to his children, and Dayo is barely fifteen.” Eleanor’s tavern is loud around them, but all those souls had been louder. They’d been screaming.

“How do you know all this?”

Silver picks up his mug just for something to do, but he doesn’t pretend to drink. Instead, he shifts his gaze to Flint’s soul, close enough now that there will be no question of what he’s done. No human face to hide behind.

“I looked,” he says. “I can see everyone, Captain.”

Flint doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t look away from Silver’s empty eyes. “You’ll be pleased to hear that the women are all going to be employed by Mistress Guthrie. The men are to join the crews of her new consortium’s merchant sailors. They’ll all be paid. They’re not going back into bondage.”

They’re not free to do as they chose, either, but who the hell in the world is?

Silver. Silver can go where he pleases, provided he can find a ship to give him passage, and willing souls on the other end.

Provided he can get the gold.

Is it Silver who wants the gold, or is it Eleanor? Is it Silver who detests the sale of slaves, or is it Kayode? Is it Silver who wants to run, or is it Solomon Little? Is it Silver who wants Flint to put a hand on his arm, or John?

It doesn’t matter.

They’re all him.

“Would that everyone could be so lucky,” he says carefully, letting his eyes clear.

“Indeed.” Flint’s got his lower lip resting on two fingers, staring at Silver as though he’s something particularly fascinating.

“Ask me. Everyone does.” _What are you?_ And Silver has never given the honest answer. He won’t today, either.

“What can you do?”

He tries not to smile at the novelty, but he does anyway. “I can’t bring back the dead,” he says, watching to see if Flint’s face moves at all. It doesn’t. “I can’t change someone’s heart. But with a piece of your soul, I could get you almost anything else you wanted.”

“Almost?”

“I’d be lying if I assumed there were no limits.” Silver leans forward. “I could get you the _Urca_ gold without you needing to lift a finger, of that I’m certain.”

“And the price is my soul?” his face is calm, but a moment ago his soul had been turning with rage and memory. “I’ll do this human. Or not at all.”

“More men will die.”

“Men always die. If I did it your way, that outcome would inevitably lead to death as well. Or can you tell me that what people long for doesn’t usually kill them?”

Silvers smiles.

“That’s what I thought.” Flint shakes his head. “Goodnight, Mr. Silver.”

“Wait.” Silver catches Flint’s arm before he can think better of it. “Are you going to tell anyone?” Or run him off the ship?

“You’ve been useful twice so far. For your own purposes, I’m sure, but everyone works at their own purposes. My men’s souls are their own. If any of them are fool enough to sell to you, I’m sure I can’t stop them. I’d appreciate it if you told me, though, so I can take those outcomes into account.”

He pulls his arm free, and Silver looks at the ceiling instead of watching him leave.

 

 

xiv.

There’s a trick to peeling potatoes— of digging the knife in just enough and following the curve, while being careful not to hit his thumb in the process. It would be rhythmic and soothing if it weren’t for Dufresne looming over him, shuffling awkwardly from foot to foot.

He’s going to get sand in his shoes.

“What?” Silver asks, when it’s clear the new quartermaster isn’t going to speak on his own. He looks a bit stupid, with his unevenly shaved head and the gunspot of jaws on his shoulder scabbing and flaking.

“I have to ask you something. On behalf of… some members of this crew. Just to put the matter to rest, you understand.”

“Alright.” 

“Are you a witch?”

Silver puts down the potato. “Am I a what?”

“A witch.” To his credit, Dufresne looks like he’d rather be back on the deck of the _Andromache_. “It was requested that I… find an answer to this pressing question.”

“Ah.” Silver thinks back to who has been giving him weird looks these last few days. “Was it Mr. Turk?” Silence. “Morely?” Silence. “Randall? Logan? Irving?”

“The individuals have asked to retain their anonymity in the hopes of avoiding retaliation,” Dufresne says primly.

Well that won’t hold up in pirate court. “It’s Mr. Turk, isn’t it.”

Dufresne rolls his eyes a little.

“Well. You can be pleased to tell Mr. Turk that I am not a witch. Although if we’re taking votes, I’d rather have a witch on my crew than not, considering what we’re about to embark on.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Dufresne says, and stomps away to where— ah, yes— Turk and Randall are lurking behind a palm tree.

Silver returns to the potatoes.

A few minutes later, the quartermaster comes stomping back. “Do you have _proof_ that you’re not a witch?”

“Does anyone?”

“One of the, er, concerned men says he overheard you talking with the Captain, and now—”

Well, he’s never admitted to being a _witch_. “I confessed to the captain something about my father,” Silver says, realizing this strategy could backfire rather spectacularly. “He wasn’t a Christian. But I am—” or at least, John Silver was— “So I don’t think there should be any issue.” Dufresne stares, and Silver raises an eyebrow. “Do you want to check my penis, to make certain?”

“I— no, that’s quite alright, thank you.”

Good. Because Silver doesn’t quite remember if it looks correct. He makes a mental note to see one at his earliest convenience so he can make sure he’s made his properly, in case someone calls his bluff. He’s not sure Max would have told him.

 

 

xv.

“The sky is falling,” Logan says, and he throws up just next to Silver’s shoes.

Silver moves to avoid it, which puts him under a steady trickle of water leaking down from above. Underneath them, the sea rolls.

“It’s just a storm.”

Logan is right, though. It doesn’t feel like a storm. It feels, somehow, like a judgment.

As does Logan’s vomit, with its undigested meat. Randall is going to be upset to learn what happened to their efforts.

“Please, God, I just want to see Charlotte again.” Logan runs a hand through his beard, smearing the bits of vomit he collects on the ropes of his hammock. “I’d do anything.”

Silver leans forward.

“Anything?”

 

 

xvi.

They round the rocks, and the _Urca_ isn’t there.

It breaks like a wave over the men— confusion and disappointment, now, but it will change. Flint and Gates go into the captain’s cabin to argue. The men mutter. Singleton and Morely look at Silver, and he tries to look as innocent as possible.

He can swim to shore from here, if he has to.

Probably.

Gates comes out of the cabin, twitching with something that is not joy.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Singleton asks, loud enough for Silver to hear. “He lied about the schedule just in time to keep the vote in his favor. But there was never a prize out here.”

“I read the logbook, too,” Gates says. “As did Mr. De Groot, as did Mr. Dufresne. And even if I hadn’t, the captain isn’t as stupid as you are, Singleton, to get himself a plan that leaves him with two ships full of angry men.”

The muttering continues, sounding like _vote_ and _governor of an island_ and it’s not that Silver wants to be left on a ship captained by Singleton, but if he approaches it right, he might be able to get Flint’s soul in exchange for his captaincy back—

“Man-o-war!” comes the shout, and Flint and Gates go back inside to continue their argument.

The minutes pass, the men’s shuffling gets louder, and Silver might never get another chance this good. Flint is trapped, so close to what he’s always wanted, he’s going to have to have no choice but to listen.

Silver lets himself into the captain’s cabin, an argument ready on his tongue, but Flint isn’t at the desk like he’d expected. He’s on the floor, holding—

The world reorients itself, and Silver drops down to examine Gates’s body.

“What the fuck are you doing to him?”

“Making sure there’s nothing incriminating—”

“Stop.” Flint’s voice is cracking, and Silver doesn’t dare look at his soul to see if it’s doing the same. He wanted him trapped: he didn’t want him _broken_ , not like this. “Stop. There’s no way out of this.”

“Take it from me. There’s always a way.”

Flint pulls Gates closer to him. It would be sweet, if it weren’t for the strangulation marks growing on his neck. “Your way doesn’t bring back the dead. It’s useless to me.”

 _If you’d given me your soul in the first place, he might be alive._ Silver doesn’t say it, because it might not be true. “Gates is old,” he says instead. “His heart gave out. By the time the men find out otherwise, you’ll be in battle, and then you’ll be the captain that made us all richer than the King of England.”

 

 

xvii.

Poor Dufresne.

Not the pirate the last two quartermasters were. Not the man they were. Trying desperately to live up to a role he earned with his teeth, but that was never his weapon.

“So, Mr. Quartermaster,” Silver says, lowering his voice like he’s telling a secret, “what is truly in their best interests?”         

 

 

xviii.

Flint says _tobacco_ , and mutiny boils over, with Dufresne screaming about murder, Turk screaming about witchcraft, Singleton screaming about weakness, and the Man-o-War slipping away from them.

And Silver stands on the side. This is the view he’s used to, watching others make decisions, enabling their worst impulses— but this time, the side view gives him a choice.

A cannon.

He could start the battle with the Spanish ship. He could kill half the men around him, the ones screaming for his head, for Flint’s. Begin a fight that is uncertain at best. He doesn’t want these men dead.

But.

If he doesn’t distract them, they may kill Flint, before Silver has won his soul. The crew will fracture, and Silver will never get his hands on that gold.

It’s no choice at all, really.

“Sorry,” he tells them, the shot still ringing. Flint meets his eyes. “Had to be done.”

 


	3. Chapter Two

i.

Sometimes, before he falls asleep, Flint imagines his own death.

Predictable ones— prize ships that get spooked, inclement weather, a knife in his back, a rope around his neck. And the less obvious— poisonings, elaborate conspiracies from Harbor Island puppet masters, old age.

Imagine it enough times, he reasons, and he cannot fear it. Imagine it enough times, and he can think of ways to beat it. When to grab the pistol. When to shoot a rival. For every death, he has tried to think of a way out. 

Tried to think of a way he could have saved Thomas.

So he knows what to do, for drowning. Drop his coat, his shoes. Kick. Do anything but wait, letting the water pressure build up around his ears. It’s not peaceful, not with the explosions overhead and the saltwater in his wounded shoulder, but at least he can’t hear the yelling.

He knows what to do, but maybe he won’t do it.

He closes his eyes.

 

 

ii.

Silver has lived the deaths of hundreds of people.

Hangings, illness, accidents, battles, murders— an epilogue to all the sweeter memories, the fears, the dreams. Death is just the last in a string of significant moments, and yet also something entirely unique.

Beauclerc, confused as he hits the water, gone when a piece of debris hits him in the head. Singleton, trying and failing to pull himself to the surface with his one remaining arm, all ambition and anger and hope turned to pain and more pain and fear.

And just below him. Flint. Sinking with his arms above his head, reaching for nothing, face blank. His soul is still, and maybe he’d looked at the destruction above him and thought that death was a better option, but Silver grabs his arm anyway.

And he swims.

 

 

iii.

He hauls Flint onto the beach, trying to ignore the trail of blood in the sand behind him. _Too much blood,_ he thinks, and it takes a moment to place the thought as one of John Silver’s. It’s not too much blood, really. It’s just a shoulder.

“Don’t die,” he mutters, rolling Flint onto his side. He doesn’t have anything but scraps of his salt-infused shirt to stop the bleeding, and that’s going to hurt like a motherfucker, but he does what he can. There’s nothing to do afterward but watch men crawl from the sea like baby turtles, clutching the sand in their palms and relearning how to breathe.

They give Flint and Silver a wide berth, looking out at the water, waiting for men who aren’t coming.

Eventually, Flint grunts. Looks from the beach under him to his shoulder, to Silver, to the men.

“They’re trying to decide if they should hang us both.” Silver digs his toes into the ground. He hates being wet like this. He also hates being hanged. The thought gives him the edge of a memory— rope against his neck, a woman’s eyes alight with hate.

When he speaks, he sounds like he's gargled all seven seas. “What are they hanging _you_ for?” 

“I did fire the first shot. That combined with my presence at your house that night, and the fact that I’ve met Eleanor Guthrie, was enough for the men to be convinced I’m your agent in evil. It didn’t help that Mr. Turk used most of his last words claiming I’m something other than human.”

“Huh.” Flint looks dazed, but not _that_ dazed: he’s assessing Silver with his usual level of intensity. “All that fighting and you don’t have a scratch on you.”

“Maybe I’m just a lucky man.”

“Not for long,” Dufresne says, marching over to them. He’s a very lucky man, too, though he probably doesn’t feel it. But he hasn’t lost his spectacles: those are hard to replace. “Get him up.”

 

 

iv.

Flint asks for volunteers, and Silver raises his hand.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Flint demands, once the men have left them standing on the beach.

Silver shrugs. “I didn’t see any of them offering, did you? And even if they had, it’s not as though you can trust them to keep you alive.”

“And I’m supposed to trust _you?”_

That shouldn't offend him, but it does, a little bit. “Have I done anything to suggest you shouldn’t? Have I don’t anything but help you— warn you about Vane’s men, warn you about Singleton, walk into British rifles for you?” Sort of. “Brace yourself, but I’m the only person here who doesn’t want you dead.”

Flint stares back, defiant as anyone can look when they’re bloody, sandy, bandaged, and missing their shoes. But whatever he thinks of Silver, he seems to decide that he is a problem that can be dealt with later, and instead decides to march into the sea.

 “Are you just going to swim one-handed?” Silver calls after him.

Flint doesn’t answer.

Maybe Silver was wrong to be worried, earlier. He’s going to have all the time in the world to collect Flint’s soul, because Flint will kick sand in the face of death and belly flop away. And there’s nothing for Silver to do but follow him, while asking himself what the hell he thinks he’s doing.

Is one soul really worth the trouble?

Silver looks one more time.

 

 

v.

They’re tied to chairs, staring down Spanish guns.

“Sell me your soul and I’ll get us out of this,” Silver mutters.

“No.”

“Fine.” He tugs his hands out of the ropes. It’s easier than opening Flint’s front door. “But if I get shot, I’m going to be really pissed.”

 

 

vi. 

When Flint was young, his grandmother told him about the fair folk. About the ashrays in the water, faerie dogs in the highlands. About favors that could be granted, and all the things that could be taken away.

Flint had looked out at the sea, while his father was away on voyages, and wondered if the fair folk would bring him back.

They hadn’t. Eventually, the sea claimed his father, and his grandmother stumbled and never recovered, his mother’s grave was plowed for a field and a man named Hennessey took him under his wing. He tried to forget his grandmother and her stories, as he tried to forget his father, as he tried to forget the feeling of land under his feet.

It never worked.

He looks at the creature with a man’s face and remembers what happens to those who think they can outwit the faeries. He remembers the man he loved like a father, telling him he is monstrous. And if he sold his soul, that would make it true— there would be no going back, after that. No walking away from this name he has created. He would be everything they said he was.

But is the decision to let more of his men die on that principle not monstrous in and of itself?

They knew what they were getting into, he tells himself. Lives are cheap at sea: he’s long since stopped feeling every one lost. There’s simply not enough in him.

And— if he gives Silver what he wants, maybe he’ll leave. Slip away into the night as easily as he’d vanished into the shadows of the warship, as easily as he’d freed his hands to grab the Spanish soldier’s pistol. Flint wouldn’t be so foolish as to want to hold onto Silver, but he’s undeniably useful. Even as he enacts a plan that gets him repeatedly punched.

“Solomon Little,” he says to Flint. “Unfortunate boy who grew into an unfortunate man. But when he was at a boy’s home…” he tells the story of a daily address of gossip, but Flint is still stuck on the beginning.

“An unfortunate man?”

Silver shrugs. “He sold me his soul for three thousand pounds and new teeth.”

That’s many times over what a sailor would have made in a year, but if Flint were selling his soul for money, he’d aim a lot higher. “And before he did, he talked to you about his childhood?”

“He didn’t have to. The memories that stay with you, that guide you— they leave a mark that doesn’t end with death.”

If he gave Silver his soul, he would be giving him Thomas. His grandmother. The feeling of cutting Alfred Hamilton’s throat. Flint tries not to show his horror, but he thinks he fails.

“Ask me.” It’s the second time Silver has said that, but Flint doesn’t know what question he’s expecting.

“Do you become them, then?”

“In a way. Sometimes—” and his eyes search Flint’s face, though for what answer Flint can’t say— “sometimes I end up wanting what they want. Trusting who they would have trusted. Hating who they hated. Speaking how they spoke. But they’re so mixed up in me that I don’t know where I end and they begin. What feelings have broken away from the source and I assume are only me. I only have a small piece of Eleanor, but it’s enough to make me long for the feeling of gold in my hand. Of the safety it would provide. I didn’t want that before.”

Something is falling away in Flint’s stomach, but he can’t say what. “Eleanor? She—” of course she did. Of _course_ she did. Flint hadn’t considered it as an option, because he had assumed she didn’t know what Silver could do, but that was ignorant of him. “She sold her soul to keep Nassau.”  

“For the rest of her life.”

His first thought is: good. That means their plan will work.

His second thought is: that means that if Eleanor ever crosses him, the only way to remove her from power will be to kill her.

He would tell himself she’d never do that, but he can still feel Gates in his arms. It was— he notes this with some awareness of irony— the closest he’s been to another man since Thomas.

“There’s also Logan,” Silver adds. “While we were in the storm, he wanted to guarantee he’d make it home to Charlotte. And yet I’m not feeling the urge to run to her. It’s hard to predict who will have an effect.”

Logan is sitting in the corner, muttering with Joshua about something. “I thought you were going to tell me when the crew made deals.”

“No, you _told_ me to tell you. And I did. It’s been a busy couple of days, hasn’t it.”

Silver just keeps watching him, and it’s making Flint’s skin feel funny. When he catches Silver looking with those empty, smoky eye sockets, he wants to know what he finds in Flint’s soul that’s just so fascinating. Wants to talk to Gates about it— he keeps looking for his quartermaster, expecting him to be beside him like he was for the last decade. Before he stood there like Peter had and tried to send him and Miranda away.

What Flint really wants to do is stand on deck and scream.

Instead he tells Dufresne to avoid the shipping channels, and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with a creature to watch what happens next.

“What do they fear?” Silver asks, and Flint smiles.

 

 

vii.

The day comes when the men look at him.

They’re waiting for Silver to speak, to tell them what they’ve been hiding. And it has nothing to do with their souls, with what they’re waiting for him to make happen for them.

All they want are words.

They look at him, and Silver looks back.

 

 

viii.

Eleanor tells him she’s given the fort to Charles Vane, and Flint can barely move with the fury of it.

More than half his men dead, Gates’s blood on his hands, Silver’s eyes on the ship, and now— and now—

He’d been so _close_ to Thomas’s Nassau.

He waits for her to acknowledge the consequences. Waits for her to tell him she’s sorry. But he gets nothing, and perhaps their partnership was the piece of her that now lives in Silver.

“Is it true about Silver?” he asks, before she can continue trying to defend Vane. “And you?”

Her eyes widen a little, but more out of anger than surprise. “He told you about our arrangement?”

“He said you sold him your soul.”

“I did.” She hesitates for a second, then says, very quickly, “I watched him call a piece of it out of my body and spread it over Nassau.”

Flint hadn’t realized he’d been holding onto this last bit of doubt that Silver could do what he claimed until she confirms it. Because Eleanor would never be taken in by fairy tales. Not if she couldn’t see it herself.

“You realize it doesn’t make you infallible. Vane could still leave you with an empty pile of sand.”

Something is twitching in her forehead. “It won’t come to that.”

“No?” is she going to start fucking Vane again, or what? “Are you very, very certain?”

“Charles has no interest in destroying Nassau, he has an interest in pissing me off. And I had no interest in letting an old man’s pride sink every ship in the bay. You focus on the gold. I will focus on Nassau— unless you’re planning to tell Hornigold that Eleanor Guthrie is so unreasonable because she sold her soul to the devil.”

“I don’t think that story will benefit anyone,” Flint says honestly. The last thing he needs is the word getting out. The more people sell their souls, the more conflicting outcomes are going to emerge. What will happen when that kind of power is put at cross-purposes?

What kind of chaos will emerge, if more people are given what they want the most?

What people love will kill them, if given the chance. 

Flint has learned that lesson enough times.

 

 

ix.

“Can I assume that when you say you’ll go to the beach to make this appeal, you mean me?” Flint doesn’t look up, but Silver climbs out of the window seat anyway. “Alright, then.” Is it because Flint might be starting to rely on him? Or because he just assumes that if Silver can convince a man to give up his sense of self, he can convince a man to turn against Charles Vane— a man who, two weeks ago, was the scorn of the entire town?

Maybe that’s what’s eating at Flint. How quickly the opinion shifts. As though last week Flint was not an outcast on his own ship. As though last month, Silver was not a merchant sailor with a different name.

“Why do you think they went up that hill?”

Silver stops at the door. “Are you asking my opinion?”

If he is, he isn’t going to say it again.

“I could look into every soul on that beach and I’m still not sure I’d be able to give you the answers that you want.” He sits down in the chair. Smooth, carved wood. This Spanish crew knew how to have nice things. “Perhaps they’re more afraid of losing the fort than they are of Vane remaining in it.” Nothing Silver has seen in men’s souls will surprise Flint. Not really. “Perhaps it’s just them expressing their opinions about you.”

 

 

x.

“With the things you’ve done,” Silver says, and Flint doesn’t know if he’s talking about these last few weeks, or his reputation as a pirate, or even Thomas and how Flint left him to die. Can he see that? Is Flint’s every thought written out, like a book Silver can flip through at a whim? “It must be awful, being you.”

 _Then why_ , Flint wonders, _do you keep asking for my soul?_

 

 

xi.

The first time he came to Nassau, he’d thought, _we can’t let the pirates get the fort._ The second time he came to Nassau, he thought, _we need to make sure that the pirates keep the fort._

Now, he fires, and he thinks both versions of himself perish in the attack. 

Miranda drops a book in front of him and tells him a story about Abigail Ashe.

Eleanor’s shotgun still ringing in his ears, Flint tells a story, and wonders if he can again become someone new.

 

 

xii.

Billy lies on the beach, covered in sand and full of stories.

He says the Navy is still on Harbor Island. He says they’ve got Richard Guthrie, and who knows who else. He says they kept him under guard, but he escaped. He says Flint tried to save him.

His soul says that he’s scared, his soul says that he hurts, his soul says that he’s angry.

“Do you think they’ll leave, when they see you’ve escaped? Take Richard back to London? Or will they wait?” Flint sounds like he’s been eating gravel, and Silver wonders what happened with Miranda. What happened with Charles Vane.

“They were still resupplying when they got Bryson’s message,” Billy says. “They’re preparing for a long journey back to London. I don’t know what they’ll do now, but I imagine that if they return, they’ll do it with more ships. More men. And Guthrie, to tell them who to destroy.”

 

 

xiii.

He’s counting the votes when he feels Logan die.

That bit of Logan’s soul in his knee is trying to pull him up the hill where the rest of it will be waiting, tied to the earth by the bit Silver carries.

He hadn’t even seen Logan slip away.

What secrets left with him?

Even without the soul to guide him, Silver knows where the body will be.

Everyone watches him, the _Walrus_ man without the _Walrus_ , walking down the street. Only the second one to have left the beach— they’ll be realizing it now, if they haven’t realized it before. Silver throws open the doors to the inn, half expecting chaos: but it is as peaceful as it could be, with a fight brewing. The fiddler winks as Silver walks past, his tune changing—

_“My mind still then contriving was how I might gain all worldly wealth…”_

Silver give him a coin, but he doesn’t stay to listen, asking for the madam.

“You found her,” Max says, and Silver smiles.

“Somehow, I’m not surprised.” He lowers his voice. “I’m here for what remains of Mr. Logan.”

 

 

xiv.

With nowhere to go, the soul stays near the body. Swirling around it, confused, adrift— Silver opens his mouth and coaxes it in. Gives it a home. A place to rest.

And for a second he’s watching his brother die on a Navy ship, he’s sitting downstairs looking at the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, he’s watching Muldoon throw his head back and laugh, he’s feeling Charlotte’s hands on him and flying apart, there’s a sword going into his gut as Anne Bonny glares up at him—

“He was one of yours, then?” Max asks.

Logan settles, curling up tight under his left arm. “I suppose, yes. Listen. I don’t know if you know, but Anne Bonny killed—”

“No.”

The memory is there. Unmistakable as the two bodies still warm on the floor. “No?”

“You go to your crew with this, and it will be chaos. I have been your ally— it is your turn to be mine.” Her voice is steady, even as her hands shake. “We can fix this.”

If Flint even suspects that anyone in this house has gotten the location of the gold, it's going to be a fucking nightmare. But Logan didn’t give it up— the exchange is burning in his soul. He might have answered eventually, but he was never given the chance.

Will Flint take Silver’s word on that?

Or will he begin a war not only against Hornigold and Vane, but the entire town? Silver can’t get headaches, but he thinks this must be what they feel like.

“My crew was expressly forbidden from entering this place,” he says. “I imagine you noticed.” She must have been in on it. The gold. The plan. “How were you planning on covering this up?”

She shakes her head. “Something about them falling in love, running away. That’s as far as I got.”

“His brother.” There had been an explosion, and his brother’s limbs had flown in all directions while Logan screamed— “I hear he has a brother in Providence. Logan was among a number of men to desert this morning, instead of facing death over the fort. He and his love fled together, I heard he has a brother in Providence, not surprised that’s where he went, are you following?”

Max is still looking at the woman on the floor. “What did he want from you?”

“To live to see Charlotte again.” Silver can’t look at her body. Logan’s soul isn’t conscious anymore— he doesn’t know that Charlotte is dead. But Silver does. Silver has those shining memories. Silver has her smile and her manipulations and the softness Logan had felt around her.

_Can you tell me that what people long for doesn’t usually kill then?_

All he says is: “Please clean this up.”

 

 

xv.

The solution, as it presents itself to him, is obvious.

He can get the gold. Satisfy that craving that’s been eating him up. He can give Eleanor— and Flint— what they want. And perhaps he can win some more allies in the process.

When Vincent and Irving make it to the beach, he starts to talk.

The crews mutter and disperse and Silver stands in front of them and tells them the new plan. They look to him, and they listen to him. It’s just like selling a soul, but instead he’s selling a dream.

 _I fixed it for you,_ he thinks rather smugly, when he and Flint make eye contact. Yes, Flint is going to be angry. But Silver also knows what Flint wanted, in this moment, and it isn’t the goal he’d been pursuing for months.

Humans.

They never quite know what they want.

The men vote to sail to Charles Town, Dufresne stomps off into the night, and Flint glares at Silver over a table.

“Did someone make a wish?” he asks. “Does a latter wish overrule a previous one?”

“As I recall…” Silver leans closer, just for the joy of watching Flint’s eyes track him. “You never bargained for anything with me. I have followed you this far because the gold seemed like a good thing to have. I’ve brought the men to your side. I got Billy in line. But let us be clear.” He lets his eyes shift. “I am not one of your men.”

“Bullshit.” Flint leans forward to match him. “Let us not pretend you’ve been staying for my benefit, or the gold. You’ve finally found a place where you matter to people who don’t know your true nature. You’ve found people who, with just a bit of a push, will let you feed on them. Here, you are someone. You aren’t about to give that up.”

Please. “I have stood behind kings,” Silver hisses. “I have walked in the greatest armies known to history. You think a few pirates are going to be what makes me?”

“I think that on my crew, you matter without any of that. Those men out there listen to you. They care about what you think, not just what you can do for them. Where else in the world is that true?”

Silver glares, and he plans.

 

 

xvi.

“Mr. Silver,” Miranda says, nodding her head. “Good to see you again.”

Silver gives her a little bow, as though they’re in a fancy London estate and not on the deck of a stolen ship. “Pleasure. I hope you’ve had no more unexpected guests, Mrs. Barlow.”

“Oh, only a few. Less deadly, but fouler tongued.”

Abigail looks between them with wide eyes, and Silver bites down on a smile. “I helped run some thieves out of her house, a few weeks past,” he says. “Delightful business.”

“Indeed.” The way Miranda looks at him, Silver is sure that Flint has told her something. Perhaps what he is, perhaps simply to be wary of him. But if he has, it’s a guideline she ignores, because Silver is sitting up on watch later when she joins him.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Silver asks.

“Mm.” She leans against the mast, looking up at the moon. "Lovely night." 

It's a night like any other, but perhaps most nights at sea are lovely when one isn't used to them. “Hasn’t he told you to stay away from me?”

Miranda doesn’t snort, but he imagines that she wants to. “Not precisely.”

“He didn’t think you’d be tempted?” it’s easier to use his real eyes, on watch. To see the faint glow of Muldoon far out of earshot, and Miranda next to him, with history packed so tightly that it will break free at the slightest touch.

“Is that what you think he thinks?”

“I think he fears the ramifications of what you would ask me for.” She wants peace, she wants safety, she wants out of the pirate life and she wants Flint to come with her. That’s obvious simply by the fact that she talked him into this plan in the first place.

But at any time before, Flint’s acceptance of those plans would have meant the loss of his own. Now?

Silver looks and looks and he can’t quite figure out what Flint wants now.

 

 

xvii.

Silver doesn’t act in the name of what he promised Eleanor, or to prevent himself from being shot. He’s not even sure he does it to protect Flint. He sees the men, looking at him, and he remembers fighting his way through this ship with Flint at his side and he’ll be damned if he lets Charles Vane take it away from him.

It occurs to him, as he cuts the forestay, that he might be thinking like a pirate.

He points a pistol at Vane’s head and asks him what happens next.

 

 

xviii.

Miranda’s body lands, and Flint doesn’t hear it. He doesn’t feel the loss of all he imagined when he dared think of a future. He doesn’t think, _that isn’t right,_ he thinks, _of course,_ because nothing could ever work how it was supposed to, because Miranda wanted peace and that is what killed her, of course it killed her, and he has his hands around Peter’s neck before he can think beyond _maybe Silver can—_

 

 

xix.

What happens is: they ask for names.

Of his crew, those souls Silver has been watching, guiding. They want to sail away and leave Flint and his bright bright soul behind. They ask for names and Silver says no, and it’s _easy._ It’s not as though he won’t be able to get out—

Vincent’s blood splatters the side of his face.

Silver can’t risk watching his soul go, because these men are this close to losing it, and they’re the type to start setting fires, if they see him. They’ll set fires and there are too many people on this ship to risk that.

“No,” he says again, and—

And he’s being dragged, he pulls away, heads for the door— there’s a gunshot and it misses his chest, hits his leg and there’s still enough of him for it to hit, for black smoke to come out, and he falls. He falls and it hurts, even though it’s not really a leg— how silly is it that it hurts, he thinks, as they move over him, shouting and pointing. Something comes down on him, something blunt, and it hits him and he can’t seem to let go, he missed his chance to let it pass through him and now instinct keeps him together, the same one that keeps humans breathing—

“What the _fuck_ is he,” one of them is saying, and another says “—just get it off, cut it off—” and there’s a blade going through his leg and Silver can’t think, can’t move, because he’s sure that if he lets go of this flesh he’ll scatter in the breeze and the salt, never again able to be anything resembling a self, so instead he screams in languages he thought he’d forgotten.

 

 

xx.

One of the men says to him, “It’s Mr. Silver,” and of course it is. Flint starts to ask what he’d done before he sees the look on Muldoon’s face, and it’s like he missed a step on the stairs, thinking he’d had nothing else to lose and realizing that he might have lost even more than that.

“He’s alive,” Muldoon adds, and Flint reminds himself that he’s being ridiculous.

Silver can’t die.

Not like Miranda, here one second and gone the next, all for the crime of expressing the same rage that led Flint to say _whatever’s left._ The reports are still coming. Who knows how many lie dead in the city, now.

“What happened?”

Billy and Muldoon lead him to the captain’s cabin, where Silver is lying on the table. Howell stands over him, hands pressed together in a way that’s too frightful to be prayer.

“I did the best I could think to. The leg was near detached already, when we got to him. And he’s been….” He shakes his head, gesturing.

The severed limb is still there, but it takes a moment to recognize it as such. It’s black and hardened, looking more like rock than flesh. Solid, and yet Flint thinks that if he touches it, it might fall apart under his hands.

He makes himself look at Silver. At the bits of black smoke, slipping out under the bandage.

“Shit.” Flint moves before he’s thought about it, cupping his palm over a bit of soul trying to escape. It slips past him as though he isn’t there at all, and for just a moment, Flint tastes sand.

“I always told Turk he was crazy,” Billy says. “But you don’t seem surprised.”

How could he be surprised? How could anyone be surprised? How anyone ever looked at Silver and saw something ordinary is beyond him. But it’s too late to cover for his knowledge, so Flint settles for looking inscrutable.

“What _is_ he?” Howell asks, and Flint doesn’t have an answer for that either.

Muldoon squares his shoulders. “Whatever he is, he saved us.”

And that, too, is true.

 

 

xxi.

——————he is standing in the desert, holding a cup of water out for a man on a camel————— he is in front of a pagoda, a woman in his arms————— he’s kneeling over a man’s body, hands on his face, weeping———————and then he stirs and begins to wake.

 _Come back,_ he thinks, to all those faces he’s forgotten, to all the people he knows must have once meant the world to him _. Don’t leave me here_ ———————

A noise makes him open his eyes.

And he forgets.


	4. Chapter Three

i.

Utter fucking chaos spills into Eleanor’s office, barely six hours after the sails were spotted. Flint and Rackham’s raised voices were audible even as they walked down the street, but they fill the room now, barely leaving space for Bonny and Charles at their heels.

She’d heard that Charles lived, but she hadn’t expected to see him again. Not this soon, and not like this. Not after she locked a gate and sentenced him to death.

But he doesn’t look at her. 

The door has just fallen closed when it opens again, and Max helps Silver inside. Another rumor true, but it’s jarring to see.

She hadn’t thought anything could hurt him.

Flint is shoves Rackham backwards with hands that slaughtered Charles Town. “You tried to steal it once, now you’ve stolen it again—”

“I didn’t _steal_ anything from you, you left it on the beach while you went off chasing a different plan—”

“Only because I thought it was gone, because you turned my crew against me—”

“Oh bull _shit_ —”

Bonny steps up behind Rackham, hand on her sword, and Max moves like she’s thinking about stepping in Flint’s path, but to Eleanor’s surprise it’s Charles that gets there first.

She’d thought, for a moment, that Flint had sold his soul as well. Between the dead look in his eye and his new alliance with Charles— surely that meant something fundamental had been changed. But it was nothing so magical, she’d realized, when she looked over his shoulder for Mrs. Barlow.

It would have been preferable to grief. Grief is harder to predict.

And maybe it would have been nice, to share this.

“I think everyone in this room is in agreement that we need to defend Nassau,” Charles says. “We’ve seen what’s headed our way. But unless you—” and here he addresses Flint— “want to sit around on the beach and oversee the money, it seems to me that it makes the most sense for Jack to manage the gold.”

Flint doesn’t look away from him. “Eleanor?”

“Considering she tried to kill us all to keep us from gettin’ it,” Bonny says, sneering even more than usual, “I’m not sure she should get a say.”

He turns. “You did _what?”_

“How did you think Peter Ashe was going to convince England to issue pardons, if the pirates of Nassau had just stolen five million dollars from Spain?” If they’re waiting for her to apologize, they’ll be waiting until their hair falls out.

Silver has been sitting quietly in the corner this whole time, eyes not quite pointing in the same direction. What does it mean for him, to be missing a leg, when he is what he is? Eme had brought Eleanor rumors of a man with smoke instead of blood, and even as she had laughed it off, she’s sure they were true.

Word on the island is that Mr. Silver is a hero, but a spooky one.

“Joshua,” he says, and for a moment it’s as though he doesn’t know who he’s speaking to. “Randall. Meyers. Westmor.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Silver ignores Jack, eyes on Vane. “Those were our men, who died under your orders. It seems, if we’re to hold people responsible today for who they tried to kill yesterday, we should start with those who were successful in their attempts.”

With a few words, he could restart the war between Flint and Vane’s crews. But he doesn’t say anything else.

“Or,” Max says, “we can accept that continual shifting of sands, and move forward together in these new circumstances.”

Eleanor doesn’t get the sense that Max is speaking on her behalf, but she appreciates it all the same.

And Max’s word seems to have settled the matter, at least for Jack, because he looks at Eleanor with a strange tilt in his already strange face. “I suppose that makes us partners.”

 

 

ii.

He should be able to grow it back.

As he changes his skin and eyes and hair, he should be able to change his legs. His appearance takes weeks to shift, if he puts in real effort, but in the month since he lost his leg it’s done nothing but heal over.

It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt how men talk about pain, or how he’s seen it in the memories of others. It just aches with the emptiness, of a part of him ripped away. He’d never considered that before. Never imagined it was possible.

“Do you think staring at it will fix it faster?”

If he dared look at Flint’s soul, framed in his cabin’s doorway, Silver is sure he’d see a reflection of his own.

The things he forgets haven’t bothered him much before now. But he lost something with his leg, and he doesn’t remember who: that knowledge is gone, those memories, those lives, those parts of him, and he desperately wants them _back_.

“It should have grown by now,” he says.

“It only takes a few months to grow human hair to any significant length, but it takes well over ten years to grow a leg to full size. Have you ever lost a limb before?”

“If I did, it grew back.”

“You can't remember?”

Of course he’d can't. “I’ll forget everything, eventually. When I use up a soul, I lose their memories, and some of mine associated with them, with that time. Maybe it’s for the best— I’d go insane, I think, if I could remember it all.” If the futility of life was just staring him in the face, day in and day out, everything done before and everything ending in dust.

“Perhaps you should write a book.” The corners of Flint’s mouth are twitching into the closest thing to a smile Silver has seen since he came back without Miranda, and for a second he doesn’t mind that he’s being mocked.

“Perhaps I already wrote a book,” he says. “How would I know? How would you?”

“How far back can you remember?”

There is no clear line, and he was never good at remembering the year. “I think I remember the Battle of Gainsborough. And little bits, from earlier— textures. Sounds. Faces.” He makes himself smile.  “I could have been anyone, really. King David, at your service.”

“His lineage was very well documented,” Flint points out. “Yours is not.”

“Alright. Perhaps I was Goliath.”

“No.” But Flint is smiling now, too. “You were whichever of Odysseus’s men opened that bag of winds, and you washed up on shore somewhere.”

“I take offense to that.” But the action— scheming to take treasure from the captain— is closer to the truth than Silver wants to contemplate.

“Well, whoever you were, I’m sure it was a nuisance.” Flint puts a hand on Silver’s shoulder, and Silver isn’t expecting it. Not expecting the warmth, or the way it makes his shoulder feel real. As if the only solid parts of him are the ones under Flint’s touch. He tenses, and Flint pulls back quickly.

It’s not as though Silver can explain, so he lets Flint leave the room.

 

 

iii.

Max is using the _Urca_ gold to buy the town’s businesses.

Eleanor tries not to see this as an affront. Tries not to see this as competition. How can she blame Max for doing what she would have also done?

And yet she can’t help but feel like she’s being watched, across that bridge. Can’t help but feel that by the end of this, whatever it is, it’ll be a chess board: her pieces verses Max’s.

And Eleanor just doesn’t have the money.

Reality is a fragile thing, here. Players coming and going and changing with no warning. Ned Lowe, believing he was in control until the very end. Flint, believing in pardons and society until the tide went out and he declared war against the world. His lecture about Charles in the fort seems rather absurd, compared to that: he’d blown their one chance at achieving their goal, but had she bitched and whined to him about it?

No. She’d turned to defending Nassau. She’d let her rivals take the money that would have been hers, had Flint not brought up the pardons in the first place. She’d become partners with Jack fucking Rackham, of all people.

He’s not… the worst.

“I think we can agree that Nassau is more important than our past differences,” he’d said at their first meeting.

“Alright.”

“If we agree that you will take no action against me or my allies, for taking the gold Flint had laid claim to, allowing us to spend our shares as we so choose, in turn I will harbor no ill will against you for sending assassins to kill us.”

That was the day Max had bought the tannery. Eleanor had known. Jack had known. She hadn’t brought it up. “Alright,” she’d said again. “I think we can also agree that rebuilding the fort is going to be crucial,” and they’d been off.

Three weeks later, they’d shared a brief chuckle over a drunk in her tavern.

With Flint gone, Charles not speaking to her, and Max building an empire across the street, Eleanor will take whatever partners she can get.

 

 

iv.

“Do any of you want to surrender to men who fear you?” Flint asks. “Lay down arms in a battle that we are winning? Neither do I.”

It’s not until the rain is in Silver’s face, the wind tearing at him, Kayode’s fear of drowning nearly stifling, that he thinks, _what the hell was that?_

But it’s too late, it’s far too late. Men and women have written poetry about the sea, and Silver didn’t really understand any of them until this moment, when it’s coming for everything he cares about and he can’t do anything but let its angry hands pull his men off the mast, throw the light of their souls into the depths, tearing at everything it passes.

He and Muldoon try to plug holes down below, and Silver should be able to fix this. Fifty men up there desperate to live, he should be able to let them, but the boat is shaking and so are his hands and he doesn’t trust himself to be able to direct a soul with any accuracy. Doesn’t trust any man to concentrate on keeping them all alive.

“I’m useless,” he mutters, and Muldoon snorts.

“We’ve got our share of useless fucks on this crew. You ain’t one. Logan told me what you were, you know. Before Charles Town. Didn’t quite believe him.”

“And what am I?”

Silver’s never been the one to ask that question.

“Well, you’re our quartermaster, ain’t you?” Muldoon pauses to take a nail out of his mouth, hammer falling in between words. “If it weren’t for you, we’d all be rotting in Charles Town bay. You’re… some kind of guardian angel, I guess.”

When Silver laughs, he gets seawater to the face, and he fumbles for some wood to plug the leak. “I’m not an angel. And I’m certainly no guardian. I can’t do anything by myself— I use someone else’s soul to fulfill someone else’s desires, and in doing so, they become me. So what the hell am I?”

“I get it.”

“Do you?”

“’Course I do. You think you’re the only man on this ship who’s never wondered who he is? We all ask ourselves that, first time we kill a man who don’t deserve it, or stole from men just as wretched as we are. Ask whether we’re ourselves, or just what circumstance made us.”

“And how do you get past it?”

Muldoon shrugs. “You decide what version of yourself you can live with, and you try and be him.”

It’s not a bad philosophy, but ten minutes later, Silver wonders if he can be the version of himself who didn’t save Muldoon. Who held the man’s hand as the water rose, briny and deadly.

“You can take it,” Muldoon gasps, trying to keep his mouth above water. “Take it—”

“No.” Silver squeezes his fingers tighter, as if he has the strength to pull him up. He can go underwater for as long as he wants, but he can’t move the cannon on his own. He can’t move things, only slip past them. “No, make a deal, I can get you out of this—” it would be clumsy at best, but he can try—

“No.” Muldoon tries to smile, and it’s the worst thing Silver has ever seen. “No, I’d rather die as all of me than live as only part.”

“But you’ll _live.”_

“It’s alright. I don’t— I don’t want to go to Hell, John, I’d rather be you, help you, help the men, just take it—”

Silver does.

It’s different, without already having a piece to use the way, and probably only works because Muldoon is so willing to go— he’s mornings on a fishing boat, under fire from Spanish cannons, Joshua smiling over breakfast, hands buried in a barrel of grain, letting it run through his fingers, the creak of the _Walrus_ in the night—

And Silver is feeling stronger than he has in weeks, while the water closes over his friend’s face.

 

 

v.

Of all the things she expected when the British came, she forgot to count in her shitstain of a father.

He stands in her tavern, hat still firmly on his head, backed by redcoats. They don’t look like they’re there to imprison him. Eleanor grits her teeth and imagines the roof falling in and crushing him, his brains splattering out on her floor, the smug look on his face distorted and rotting in the ground.

Then she smiles.

She smiles, because he is with a force that took her island without firing a shot. The governor had walked onto the beach, because they hadn’t had enough ships in the harbor to threaten them, and Flint wasn’t there to frighten the men into competency.

Because Flint is dead.

Or so they say.

Eleanor isn’t sure she believes it. Not when he has John Silver on board. And Silver— can he even die? If he does, what happens to her? Does she get her soul back? Does she lose Nassau?

It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Wherever he and Flint are, it isn't here.

Flint has a habit of not being here when power changes hands.

“Father,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you would.” He speaks how he’s always spoken: as though there’s a bad smell in the air, and he’s trying not to breathe too much. “May I come in?”

 

 

vi.

“He wants me to publicly back the governor and his new council.” Eleanor tries to seethe and keep her voice down at the same time: this is an occupation, and God knows who’s listening at the door.

“He may well be right,” Scott says. Gently. His voice is always gentle, even when he’s angry. She doesn’t know how he does it, and she tries to focus on anything else instead. The torn corner of a piece of paper. The ink stains under her fingernails. The uncharacteristic quiet outside. “The street will likely side with the governor, with or without you. It would be safer to establish yourself as an ally early on.”

He’s right, she knows he’s right, and that’s what she’d been thinking right until her father walked in the door. “My father sailed at the governor’s side for weeks. Gave him all the information he had on the captains of Nassau. How to manage them. How to manage me.” Up until his arrest, she’d feared he would come back as the new governor. Until she’d made that deal with Silver. But now—

What if Silver really is dead? What if the deal is off?

She needs to stand, she needs to move— she pushes away from her desk and looks out the window instead, away from Scott, and towards the town. Her town. With men who have never liked her, and will always take someone else in her place.

This is so close to being what she wanted.

Pardons, yes.

But not a pat on the head from her father, a _thanks for keeping the island together for us, let the men take it from here._ He’ll take Nassau, he’ll take the consortium, he’ll take the _Urca_ gold, and leave her with nothing.

“Information on Nassau must have been the condition for his release,” Scott is saying, and Eleanor turns back to him.

“But he hasn’t set foot on the island in years. He knows Nassau’s trade, but he doesn’t know Nassau. Not like I do.”

“Eleanor.” He’s got that look on his face that he did when she talked about the gold.

Yes, she’ll back the governor. She’ll get her father to let his guard down. And she’ll convince Rogers that she is a far, far more valuable ally. Gain his ear. Gain his trust.

She hopes he’s at least handsome.

“Which of my dresses do you think an English governor would like best?” she asks, and Scott buries his face in his hands.

 

 

vii.

It’s almost relaxing, at first.

They send all the dead they can out to sea, the ones whose bodies hadn’t been taken already. They take stock of the damage. Grief and fear hang heavy, with a thin layer of triumph— _look what we got through. Look what we survived._

Soon, they’ll be asking if it was worth it, and Silver won’t have an answer, because Flint told Silver to stay out of his head and it should have gone the other way as well.

He’s supposed to be a few steps back from human interaction. Be able to see through it. Manipulate it.

Silver certainly isn’t supposed to fall for someone else’s manipulations.

So for the first day, it’s not a bad thing to not be worrying about sailing.

The second day, he starts to itch.

“Nassau is almost undefended.” From anyone else, it would be fretting: from Flint, it’s a pronouncement of doom.

“Hornigold couldn’t have gotten those pardons on his own,” Billy says, and suspicion starts to fester.

 

 

viii.

Six days in, Silver spends most of his time breaking up fights.

Ten days after that, men are two tired to argue. 

 

 

ix. 

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Flint says, “but did you do this?”

“What?”

“Did you do this?” he gestures to the cabin window, to the motionless sea. “On purpose? On accident? I’m not a fool. You walked away from Muldoon’s body stronger than you’ve been in weeks.”

“And what?” Muldoon’s indignation is rising. “You think his final wish was to fuck over his brothers? You think he’d do that?”

“He could have wanted to stop the winds, and you went a little far—”

“No.” He didn’t know Muldoon long. They weren’t close, and he needs to stop feeling this as a loss. People die all the time: it’s the only thing they all have in common. “If he’d made a deal with me, he’d still be alive. He gave me his soul. Said—” Flint doesn’t need to know what he said. What he felt. There’s no peace, in the memories of his last moments. And going to Silver, he knew there would be no one waiting for him.

Except Logan.

Silver is now a _Walrus_ man three times over.

“It wasn’t me,” he says finally. “I offered.” His hands had been shaking and maybe he could have done this. Maybe he almost did this. “It wasn’t me who sailed us into that storm, Captain.”

Flint’s eye twitches. “So. That’s it? This is my fault, and you want my soul as recompense? You’ll use it to make a wind that will carry us straight to Nassau?”

He’s cracking.

They’re all cracking.

But not Silver. Silver doesn’t need rations.

“No,” he says. “You know I can’t do that. Because I can only give you what you truly want— and your will to live isn’t strong enough to make a breeze.”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing here then, if it isn’t keeping as many men alive as possible?” Flint doesn’t wait for an answer. “Go ask Billy, then. Maybe he’s selling.”

“Considering Billy’s greatest wish for months has been to find a way to remove you from the picture entirely,” Silver says, trying to resist the urge to yell and punch Flint in the face. “I’m not sure you want that. You don’t care if we all die, but God forbid your ship ends up in the hands of somebody else.”

 

 

x.

He stares down Cotton and Pearson, and he wonders _why_.

Hunger, Silver understands. Thinks he understands. Human hunger is as foreign  to him as gills would be to a man: an alien feeling, but a familiar type of relief. These men were hungry, they were desperate, and they betrayed their brothers who had trusted them. It’s only when Silver sees a memory of Pearson that’s not his own that he understands why this is tearing him in two.

“A full day’s rations are gone, yet each of you accuses the other of the crime,” Silver says. “As your quartermaster, as your friend, I’m going to implore you one last time, whichever is the guilty man, to confess.”

The men snipe at each other, and Flint is reaching for his gun. Silver catches his eye, and tries to shake his head as subtly as he can.

Flint nods to the men a bit.

“—So don’t tell me I’d do something this fucking cowardly and blame it on a sniveling shit like this one—” Cotton snarls, and Silver holds up a hand.

They both fall silent, and Silver shifts his gaze from their flesh to their souls.

Fear, hunger, desperation, and a grief that’s new and sharp. It’s true of them, it’s true of most of the men, so Silver looks closer. Most men carry guilt, especially men at sea.

And these two are less hungry than the rest.

Did they split it? Did one walk in on the other? It doesn’t really matter, Silver supposes. What matters is what they do next.

He looks up at his men, more for the point of it than anything. Lets them see the smoke in his eyes before they clear, lets them remember that he is watching.

He doesn’t look at Flint.

“I see,” he says.

 

 

xi.

There is one man left on full rations, and one who doesn’t need them. So Silver has the men ready the launch. 

The water is quiet and calm and Flint still doesn’t trust him, still doesn’t listen to him. And so Silver says, “I stole it from you,” because if he thinks Silver is just going to stand around and wait for someone else to have an idea—

“Why are you telling me this?” Flint asks.

“So you can decide. To fight me, maybe throw me overboard, figure out a way of hauling yourself back to the ship on your own and hope I don’t catch up. Or acknowledge the fact that you and I would be a hell of a lot better off as partners than as rivals.”

The back of Flint’s head gives him no answers.

“You conceived all of this? The cover story, the end game, on the jetty?”

“Yes.”

His soul doesn’t have any answers either. “What did you do with your share?”

“I gave up my claim to it.” He’d never thought much about what he’d do with it in the first place, and perhaps that said something. “Because I saw no way told hold onto it and remain a part of this crew. To be honest, I’m never sure I wanted it in the first place: I’d think about how I could use it to travel, to buy my way into the circles of upper society. But I left that world for a reason.” Blood and war and pettiness and isn’t that just where he is now? What, exactly, did he leave behind?

“So why did you do it?”

“Because the alternative was to split the crew. The alternative was chaos. To help you; to help Eleanor; to prove to myself that I could. Some of the men maybe weaker than you, some of them may be less smart. But don’t for one second believe I fit that description.”

The boat bumps against the whale carcass, and the scent is almost suffocating.

“I’m not an expert in food,” Silver says, months too late, “but I don’t think you can eat that.”

Below them, a shark moves through the water.

Later, the wind begins to blow.

 

 

xii.

Max places a gleaming pearl on the desk, and the maid says they’ll need to hand over the rest of it to the Spanish.

“Who has it?” Rogers asks.

Eleanor and Max look at each other.

Later, Eleanor will tell herself that she betrayed Jack so that Max wouldn’t have to.

 

 

xiii.

“I could leave this cage as easily you can breathe,” Silver says, voice as quiet as he can. His strategy with the men thus far has been to not explicitly tell them what he can and can’t do: leaving it vague would keep them guessing, and keep from them from spilling specifics across sailor’s ports, where someone might take the rumor seriously. “You know I can. I’ll go out, look around, see if our men are alive and report back.”

“And what if they catch you?” Flint asks.

Silver lets himself sink into the shadows, just to make a point: it’s not until it’s done that he realizes how long it’s been since he’s done that, how he feels like he’s about to come apart. “They won’t.”

Flint pokes him in the forehead with unnecessary accuracy. His finger goes halfway into Silver’s head, and the sensation is so odd that Silver flinches back, solidifying once again. “They might. Or they might think to check on us, find a man missing, and shoot us all where we sit.” He turns his back on the men again, as though that will prevent them from hearing him. “I’m working on a plan.”

He’s always working on a plan. He’s got plans within plans— Silver has a dozen people in his head, and he’s sure it still must be quieter than Flint’s. “Well if that fails,” he says, “I could always fix it for you.”

He offers more out of habit than belief that Flint will take him up on it. Some might call that strength of character, on Flint’s part, but Silver thinks it’s born of stubbornness and pride, two things that have already gotten men killed. There’s fear in it, too. Silver can see it, sometimes, when the subject comes up.

He doesn’t know if Flint is afraid of what Silver will find in his soul, or if he’s afraid of what he himself would be capable of doing if he was missing part of it. Or perhaps he thinks that there’s someone waiting for him in the afterlife. 

If they get out of here alive, maybe Silver will ask.

 

 

xiv.

They bring him to the maroon queen’s daughter.

She stands in a small hut with enough power and conviction to fill a palace, and Silver lets himself hope.

 

 

xv.

She doesn’t like standing on this beach. Her back itches every time she turns it to the fort, unable to forget the feeling of cannons firing from behind her. She’d been here as a child, too, watching a Spanish armada sail away because her house had been burning and she hadn’t thought to run anywhere but _away_. She’d thought she’d seen Madi up ahead, so she’d run until her legs collapsed like the bodies in the street and there’s been nowhere else to go—

So she doesn’t like it, but she’s here, on the pretense of nodding thoughtfully at the wreckage in the harbor while her shoes fill with sand.

It certainly draws the attention away from Hog Island, where a couple dead redcoats lie in the footprints of escaped slaves.

She hasn’t seen Scott all morning.

“Absolute disgrace,” her father is saying, “but he would have been of no value to what we’re trying to build here. His departure is for the best.”

“Certainly,” the governor responds. “However, that does leave open the question of where he’s’ going next. If the men see one of their own going back on the account, it might inspire them.”

“We should waste no time in bringing him back. Having an example made.”

Eleanor doesn’t roll her eyes, but that’s only because she’s too busy squinting at the horizon, like she’s going to see Charles out there. “It’s not the inspiration you need to be worried about.”

Richard sighs. “Eleanor—” but Rogers has already turned towards her.

“What's that?”

“Half the men in this town had no intention of honoring the pardon when they took it. You know that, you’re not a fool. Vane going back on the account will give them something to talk about, but there isn’t a man or woman here who expected him to do anything else. It won’t give them any new ideas. But Vane is well liked. And if you want to hunt him down, you’ll need to send hunters. Men who know these waters. Who know Vane. What do you think will happen, if you give those men ships and set them loose?”

“You’re saying we should let him go?”

“On his own, he’s one pirate ship. Hardly a threat to you, in the scheme of things. There’s always a chance he’s sailing to the colonies, to rejoin Teach with his tail between his legs, where he will become someone else’s problem.” Not too likely, unless Teach reaches out first. “But perhaps he’s going to find Captain Flint. And if he does, you’re going to want all your men and ships here, ready to defend the island. Not out on a wild goose chase around the West Indies.”

Her father looks at her as though she’s a small child who just had a nightmare. “Flint is dead.”

“Says Hornigold. My father hasn’t lived on this island for years, governor. But I have. I know these men. I know what they’re capable of surviving, and I know how much they want this place.” She nods to the water. “If Captain Vane is gone, let him go. But if he’s coming back, you’ll need to ready a defense.”

 

 

xvi.

“I understand why you’d rather die than let me save you,” Silver tells Flint. “I understand the allure of ensuring no one will think you’re the villain you fear you are. That you think you would be, if you gave up your soul. But what a waste, it seems to me, knowing the man who talked me into giving a shit about this crew— why, he could talk the people out there into anything.”

Flint just looks at him.

But when they come for him, he leaves the knife in the dirt.

“If Flint’s plan doesn’t work,” Billy says, “you can take my fucking soul, if it’ll get us out of here. And once I’m soulless, I’m going to make sure Flint is really, actually dead this time.”

Silver reaches out to pat Billy on the arm. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, shall we?” because if it does, he’s going to have to take a side, and he’s not sure anyone is going to appreciate that.

Later, Flint says “thank you."

 

xvii.

If Scott is telling the truth about the time and direction in which Vane left Nassau, then there’s only so many places he could have gone.

“With any luck, the governor has sent men out looking for him,” Flint says. “They’d be very easy to turn back over to our side. But if he hasn’t, it’ll mean we keep our survival secret for a few more weeks. That could be worth something.”

Silver checks to make sure no one is in earshot, but the nearest group of men is hauling food down to the beach. Preparing for departure. “Good plan. I’m not sure how that in any way necessitates leaving me as collateral.”

“You’re not collateral. You’re here to maintain and solidify our alliance.”

“And to ensure that you aren’t going to sail away from here and never look back. Or betray the island to the British. That sounds like collateral to me.”

Flint claps him on the shoulder. “Then I’d say that makes you rather important, doesn’t it? Just what you wanted.”

That’s not just what he wanted, but he doesn’t have time to argue the point before a gaggle of their men arrive.

 

 

 

xviii.

“I could heal you,” he tells Mr. Scott, under the guise of giving him some water.

“No.”

“But you just got your family back.” He’s rarely in a position to argue that someone should sell their soul for their own good, and he’s not sure he likes it. He doesn’t know how to make the argument, besides _I think it’s going to make your daughter sad when you die, but I don’t want to disrupt our new alliance by revealing myself to be inhuman_. “Don’t you want—”

“No,” Scott says again. “When we die, our spirits will go back across the ocean. Back home. I will see them again someday, but not if I go with you.” He wheezes a little, hand scratching at the bed, and it can’t be _his_ bed, can it— he hasn’t been here in years, perhaps ever— so he’s either borrowed one, or it’s their sickbed. How many people have died on it, tucked away in the world? Died in peace?

All Jonathan ben Samuel wanted, in the end, was to die in his own bed. He didn’t get his wish.

Maybe Mr. Scott wants the same.

He twitches again. “And I saw, what has happened to Eleanor. I do not want that for me. I do not want that for my family— please, please do not offer it to Madi.”

 _What if you_ _’re wrong? What if this life is all you get?_ “Madi—”

“She will save me, or she will try to— do something. If you let her. Please do not.”

Slowly, Silver nods.

Later, he holds Madi as she cries, and promises he won’t breathe a word of it.

Her soul is nearly as sharp as Flint’s.

 

 

xix.

Flint returns three weeks later with Charles Vane, his men, the warship, a trove of intelligence from a captured Spanish ship, and a new plan.

They sail for Nassau.

 

 

xx.

“I understand this is where cowards come to beg forgiveness from a king.”

He used to sit with Max at this bar. Muldoon, Logan and Dobbs once laughed for nearly five minutes straight at a table in the corner. And now it’s filled with liars and traitors, and Silver’s lip curls in spite of himself.

Dufresne is the only man here he recognizes, but they’ve all got the sea in their souls.

“Captain Flint is dead.”

“Not anymore, he’s not,” says Silver, a bit of a Welsh accent creeping out.

He’s stood beside men who have held power like this. He’s stood beside men who have dreamed of it. And now here he is, and all their eyes are on him. Imagining him. Recreating him.

But Silver has a role to play.

He finishes his speech, picks up the book, and walks toward the door.

“That’s it?”

Dufresne, it seems, has found his voice. He approaches Silver now, peering through his cracked spectacles. “I know enough of you to know that, even whole, you were unworthy of half the attention we paid you. All those rumors, all that _superstition_ — but you’re just like us, aren’t you. Less, even.”

Silver should cut him down with words. Should make a remark about a man who betrayed his brothers, who tried to sell his captain to the crown, and licked the boots of the British when he couldn’t. Silver should, Silver _should_ — but he doesn’t. He wants to blame what he does next on Muldoon and Logan, but it's Silver who takes the metal tankard and smashes it against the side of Dufresne’s head.

Dufresne's companions try to stand, but Billy and Dooley stop them. Trust Silver, even though they don’t know what he’s doing as he stands over their old quartermaster.

_I am nothing like you._

He doesn’t say it.

A man more used to combat might have grabbed Silver’s false leg and tugged, but Dufresne opts to try and get back on his feet.

He doesn’t make it.

It will be hard for the others to see, in the dim light of the tavern, what has happened to Silver’s eyes. It could be passed off as simply shadows when he opens his mouth. All they will be able to know for sure is that they saw Silver reaching out a hand. Heard Dufresne say “what are you doing, what are you doing—”

Dufresne isn’t dying. Dufresne is barely injured.

His soul clings to his flesh and does not want to let go.

Silver opens his mouth, holds out a hand, and he _tears._

Dufresne screams.

Silver can’t see the pain on his face, but it’s bright in his soul— he pulls and he pulls and there he is, there’s the rest of it, fear and desperation and ambition and hatred, there’s Samuel John Dufresne. A small boy, watching the numbers above his father’s finger. A bookkeeper on a merchant ship, looking at Flint with young, admiring eyes. A man with blood his mouth, spitting it onto the deck.

He stops screaming. 

His body falls back to the floor. 

Silver swallows his soul and tries not to puke it back up. Turns to the other men in the tavern, letting his eyes change slowly, their anxious souls turning to terrified faces.

“Tomorrow you will join us. Or you’ll be looking over your shoulders for the rest of your lives.” He is not a man. He is not a pirate. He is shepherds and cooks and kings and servants and slaves. He is everything these men have dreamed of being and feared becoming. And now, he will be a ghost story.

It seems fitting.

“My name is John Silver,” he says, and for the first time, he means it. “And I’ve got a long fucking memory.”

 

 

xxi.

The body of Hornigold’s associate is still on the floor. It is, to Eleanor’s admittedly untrained eye, completely undamaged save for what might have been a punch to the face.

“I don’t see how that could have killed him,” Doctor Capell says, more to Hornigold and Rogers than Eleanor. “Perhaps it was the shock of seeing a man he believed to be dead.”

The door creaks as Max lets herself in. She’s perfectly dressed, which must mean she hadn’t gone to bed yet, and she walks without cowering between the men to Eleanor’s side.

“Are you alright?”

“I wasn’t here.” She should have been. This is her tavern, her place— Eleanor should have seen it, if only so she’d get less confusing stories from the witnesses.

“They’re saying it was John Silver. Is it true?”

“No one who was here knew him well enough to identify him,” Hornigold says. “Except for Mr. Dufresne. They all agree it was a dark man with one leg, but that could be any number of sailors.”

Max shakes her head, gaze flicking to Eleanor’s.

It was Silver.

Of course it was Silver.

Max knows it as well as Eleanor does, but they can’t say so in front of Hornigold, Rogers and Capell without losing any shred of credibility they have.

In a twisted way, Eleanor is relieved. It means her deal holds. Her power in Nassau is protected. But if Silver is with Flint now, making threats on Flint’s behalf, it means that Flint is not only alive, but her enemy.

What happens if he makes a deal with Silver as well? If despite all his big talk, he crumbles in the face of what he wants?

What happens then?

What happens when she must order Flint killed?

It’s not as though she hadn’t known that she might have to kill anyone in Nassau, when she made that deal. It’s not as though he wouldn’t at least consider doing the same.

“They claimed Flint would be waiting east of the bay, to take on recruits,” Hornigold is saying. He and Rogers start talking about posting men and deserters, but they’re missing something else: if Flint is alive, he’s probably allied with Charles. And if he’s allied with Charles, then they have a redheaded vulnerability out there, holding tens of thousands of pounds in gemstones. Eleanor doesn’t look at Max this time, but she knows the other woman must know that as well.

They need to get the cache— and Jack— off the island as quickly as possible. 

 

 

xxii.

There’s a fight inside him, and it’s going to tear him to pieces.

Dufresne can’t settle, not when he didn’t want to go, not when he wasn’t near death. The rest of Silver is trying to hold him, and Dufresne flinches away and Silver can feel his flesh splitting at the edges and he needs—

He needs to get him _out_.

Madi and Kofi have joined Billy and Dooley at his side, and he can’t do this now, he can’t _do this now._ Can’t appear weak in front of them, after all that.

He only makes it to the longboat before he starts gagging.

 “Silver,” Billy says, alarmed. He moves like he’s going to stand, and the boat rocks, and Silver can feel himself warp even as he becomes insubstantial, pistol and sword hitting the wood by his feet. They don’t have any lights, but the moon is bright enough they’ll be able to see—

_Sammy, don’t eat that, you idiot—_

_—That’s life at sea, boy—_

_This is how much money I’ve saved us in the last six months—_

Silver convulses again, shoving Dufresne _out_ — the grey smoke, glow long gone, tastes as awful coming out as it did going in.

_—No one wants you here—_

_I have a letter, in Mr. Gates’s own hand—_

Silver heaves again, and he’s gone.

The soul hangs in the air for a second before it dissolves. 

“Silver,” Billy says again. “Are you alright?”

Is he?

Silver comes back slowly. The wood under his back, a foot under his head— ah. He’s fallen. And he’s closer to Dooley’s shoes than he ever hoped to be.

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine, let me up—”

“What was that.” Madi doesn’t ask it as a question. 

 

 

xxiii.

Max doesn’t leave the tavern with the rest of the men. Instead she walks behind the bar and pours herself a drink, and Eleanor doesn’t bother to stop her.

“I will go tell the girls what to do,” she says. “What to say. To stop the men from going to the beach.”

“I know you will.”

Max offers her a cup, but Eleanor shakes her head.

“There was a time when it felt like Silver was my only ally on this island. It wasn’t quite true, of course. I had Idelle. And after a while, I had Jack and Anne. But at first…”

She doesn’t include Eleanor in that list, and she tries not to feel stung by it. They were never allies. The one time Max had asked her for something, Eleanor hadn't done it. 

“I know what you mean,” she says. “I always took for granted that our arrangement meant he’d be on my side.” That is how Flint operates best— winning over Eleanor’s allies, even when they claim to hate him. Silver. Hornigold. Charles. “But we hardly know what he is. Perhaps we were fools to think we could understand him.”

“We understand him better than the governor’s men. The rumors will start again, if they haven’t heard them already. The governor will laugh them off, insist that Mr. Dufresne died of shock. But we’ll have to prepare. I could help those rumors, make sure everyone knows some of what he can do— though it might be best if we leave out the part where he can grant wishes.”

But how? “What else do we know about him, really?” She hadn't known he could kill a man without touching him. 

Maybe she should have accepted the drink. 

“He can change his shape," Max says. "A bit, at least. I first met him when the _Walrus_ men sent him in for initiation. They had Constance wear that giant hat.” Eleanor nods, familiar with the practice. “I’m sure he changed the shape of his penis a little bit during the process.  Like he was trying to think of what it was supposed to do. I saw his eyes, I knew he wasn’t human, but I thought, if he’s trying that hard and is also that clueless, then there’s something in there I can manipulate. I wanted him on my side.”

“If we tell them to look out for anyone with a weird penis, we’re going to have to assume half the men on this island are John Silver in disguise.”

Max’s lips twitch, and Eleanor tries not to smile, but then they’re laughing, nervous and scared and they’re facing down their old friends and the island might be on the brink of collapse and there’s never been anything funnier in the whole world.

 

 

xxiv. 

“Madi and the men told me quite a story,” Flint says. He speaks quietly, as though they aren’t as alone in the cabin as they are. As though there’s anyone around who hasn’t heard that story three times over. “What happened?”

“I ripped out a still-living soul, ate it, and threw it back up.” Flint’s hand is on his shoulder, and it might be the only thing that keeps Silver corporeal, sitting here on the table. “He was splitting everything I am on the way down— even now, having forced him out, it feels like nothing inside me is connected. As though I’m simply disjointed pieces, pretending to be a man.”

“Aren’t we all,” Flint says.

“There’s a reason I’ve never done that. An unwilling soul— there’s nothing I could have made with it, because he didn’t want anything that we want. It was useless to me as sustenance, and useless as a way to accomplish anything, and yet—”

Flint waits. Outside the door, the men’s voices babble on, overlapping and tangling in their excitement.

“Ripping it out felt good.” Silver turns so he can look Flint in the eye. “Does that scare you?”

Flint looks back. “You don’t scare me.”

 

 

xxv.

The men are avoiding him.

They’re respectful about it. Almost worshipful. The story is out of Silver’s hands, and he’s sure in the last few hours it has become even more impressive.

Within a day, he will have become something else.

Madi stops next to him, her hands on the rail. “Were you going to tell me?”

That’s quite a broad question. “Which part?”

“What you are.”

Does she know what he is? Has she talked to the men? Because they don’t know, not precisely. Silver has worked very hard to keep himself from them, from these men who trust him with their lives. “What is the point in a new alliance in which you admit to such a thing?”

She remains silent for a moment, but she’s here, and perhaps that’s more than Silver had expected.

“Does my father know?”

“Yes.”

Relationships between fathers and children seem to be the source of half the world’s problems, and Silver has no frame of reference for it. He has memories, of disappointment and anger and love and pride: he remembers John Silver holding a baby and that curious mix of terror and joy. But it’s not as though he’s qualified to speak on the subject. He’s not sure if he ever had a father.

“Why do you think he did not tell me?”

“Do you want an answer to that question?”

“If I did not want an answer,” she says, “I would not have asked. Ignorance does not protect me.”

No. Not forever. “If I had to guess, it’s because he was afraid that you would be tempted by what he thinks I would offer you.”

“And what is that?”

“Any number of things.”

The ship creaks around them, the men shuffling and murmuring as the watch changes. It’s been so freeing, these last few months, to not pretend to sleep: before, in the hammocks, he’d learned every movement of the ship, the shape of every soul in slumber, thinking and thinking and thinking. He can rest. He can slow and stop and let the world move around him, but he can’t sleep.

Silver feels every second of time passing.

“If you have this power,” Madi says, “then why do you follow Flint?”

“Because—” Because he is Silver’s friend? That doesn’t seem true. Because Silver wants his soul? He does, but he is being realistic about his chances of getting it, these days. “Because I am a member of this crew. He is my captain, and I am responsible for these men. I know he seems harsh. And cruel. And he can be. But…” but how does he explain? And why should he have to? “He has a vision, of what the world could be. And it’s… it’s quite something.”

“Yes,” she agrees. “Yes, it is that.”

 

 

xvi.

The men return without Jack, without the cache, and with only a dusty Charles to show for it.

“Perhaps,” Eleanor tells Rogers, “you should have listened to me in the first place.”

“Perhaps I should have,” he says.

She kisses him, just to underscore the point.

 

 

xvii.

He had Dobbs beaten because it’s the only way to keep the alliance together. He had Dobbs beaten because he disobeyed Silver, and there’s no room for that, not if they’re going to throw themselves off this cliff they’re running toward.

He had Dobbs beaten by someone else because Silver isn’t sure he can trust himself to do it.

He thinks if he had a soul, it would be starting to look like Flint’s. He isn’t sure if that’s a good thing. But he’s been basking in Flint’s glow for long enough— perhaps this was inevitable.

“You have some experience with this, I imagine,” he says, and Flint smiles.

“A bit.”

An optimistic mosquito buzzes near Silver’s hand, but it doesn’t land, perhaps sensing that there’s nothing there it wants. It goes to try its luck with Flint instead. 

“Logan’s dead.” It's not what he wants to say, not what he wants to explain, but perhaps it needs to be stated. 

“Oh.” Flint scratches the back of his hand. “I thought he might be. There was nothing wrong with your story, but you seemed… different.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You stood a little easier on the ship. I saw you clean a pistol, once, when you hadn’t been familiar with one just days earlier.”

A group of the men go by, wheeling a pile of wood. Dooley shoots the captain and quartermaster a look that’s clearly asking why  _they_  get to sit around.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I thought if you knew I noticed, you might make a point to change your behavior. Make it harder for me to tell when you next fed.”

“Strategic.”

“I’m a master military tactician,” Flint says, straight-faced. “Can I ask you something?”

Silver raises his eyebrows at Dooley, and the man looks away. “You can ask.”

Flint doesn’t, for a moment. Instead he scratches again at the red welt growing on the back of his hand. “Have you ever regretted someone? Has a soul ever contained something so terrible you wanted it gone?”

In someone’s memory, a child screams as his throat is cut. “No.”

“No? But you cast out Dufresne.”

“Dufresne made me sick because he wasn’t supposed to be there. But I’ve seen the souls of terrible men, I’ve held the souls of terrible men, and he wasn’t one, not really. Just a coward, and a shit.”

“You don’t worry about the terrible ones? Worry they could push you into that darkness?”

“No. There’s a lot of good people in me, too. And if there weren’t— well, by that point I’m not sure I’d much care.” Silver shrugs. “I’ve never worried about it. If I somehow became convinced that, say, needless slaughter was acceptable, it’s not as though I’ve ever had the means to carry it out.”

“Until now.”

“Until now,” he agrees. He’d started that battle with the Spanish— was that the same thing? “But the truth is, for all the murderers I have rattling around here—” he presses a hand to his chest— “I still don’t like killing. I don’t see that changing.”

Flint gives him an odd look. “I’d think our lives would be nothing to you. You’ve seen enough of us come and go.”

Silver shakes his head. “But I _am_ you. When I…” he waves his hand in a circle, trying to explain consuming a soul without having to say the words. “I get bits of life. I know how much Logan’s father loved him, and I know that John— John from Parrish’s crew used to sit in a tree as a boy, and name the birds. And I have other memories and feelings that have been long since separated from any identity, but I know they were important to remain even after the body is gone. So how can I be indifferent to killing, knowing what precious things are being destroyed?”

“And if killing saves other precious things?”

Silver looks at Flint’s hands, instead of his face. “I never said that I wouldn’t.”

 

 

xviii.

The cell is cold, especially compared with the weather outside, but Eleanor isn’t going to let Vane see her shiver. Not now, not ever.

She doesn’t know what she wants to let him see.

Maybe she should have come to talk to Jack, when he was here, but she’d let Woodes and Max do that. She’d thought they’d have a better chance of talking him around. 

But they failed. And now Jack is gone. The cache is gone.

“Eleanor,” Vane says, as though he’s run into her on the street. As though they’ve spoken two words directly to each other since she locked a gate in his face. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

It’s not light enough here to read the document she brought with her, but she knows the words by heart. “I, Charles Vane, do hereby plead guilty to the charges of treason and high seas piracy. It is my hope that in exchange for this plea, I might be granted mercy, and the chance to redeem myself in the eyes of the King.”

He says nothing.

“Sigh. Repent. Perhaps even get a pardon.”

Her eyes are adjusting slowly, but she can still see him raise an eyebrow. “You came all the way down here to ask me to beg for mercy?”

“I came all the way down here to ask you to save your own life.” He can make of that what he wants. Eleanor doesn’t think she can love him, anymore, but she remembers the feeling. Remembers the thrill she once got seeing his face, feeling all that power entirely at her mercy. The bone-deep satisfaction of having him on her side.

“Save my life. For what? Are you planning to convince them that the pirate Charles Vane, who recently burned ships in their own harbor, could be a worthy ally? That I’ll just tell you whatever information you’ll need to enslave Nassau?” he smiles, and it’s just as cold as the walls of the cell. “I do not fear death.”

“I don’t care if you tell me,” Eleanor says. “I know you know where Flint is. I know you know where the cache is, what his plans are. I won’t lie and tell you that information would not be helpful to the governor and his men, but it doesn’t matter to me. Because I am going to win. I am always going to win.” It will either turn him to her side, or he’ll be gone soon anyway. “Months ago, I sold John Silver my soul in exchange for Nassau.”

She’s never said it aloud before. Not exactly. The words hang heavy in the cell, but how can they hurt her? How can anything hurt her, now?

Silver is alive.

Charles leans back against the wall, chains pulled tight. “Is that what you’re telling yourself? You can do whatever you want, because you have no soul and no way to fail?” He shakes his head. “And here I thought Scott was joking.”

She tries not to react.

She fails.

“What?”

“Mr. Scott. He’s with us. Not just him— his wife and daughter as well.”

“That’s not true.” It’s not true. “They’re dead.” They’re dead and Eleanor has spent years trying not to imagine Madi’s final moments. What Spanish soldiers could have done to a little girl.

He’s smiling again, and she wants to rip him limb from limb and feed him to the sharks. “Is that what he told you? It is, isn’t it. He told you they were killed in the Rosario raid, but they’re alive and well and plotting against you.”

“You’re lying.”

“What would I lie? How would I come up with such a lie? His daughter, Madi, she’s quite a lovely woman— strong and brave, her people love her— oh, there are those feelings you said you didn’t have, aren’t there?”

She doesn’t realize she’s moved until she punches him.

It doesn’t invalidate his point, but it feels good. She’d been joking with Scott, not a few weeks ago. About what? Clothes? And all this time— all this time—

“You have betrayed everyone who ever loved you,” Charles says. “Can you really be surprised that they would do the same?”

It doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. Not anymore. Only Nassau matters. They will see— in the end, when she’s made this place, they will see that she was right. So she turns towards the door, turns her back on Charles, on that history. “Go to Hell.”

“Sounds like I’ll see you there.”

He won’t, but she doesn’t bother to respond.

 

 

xxix.

“How does it work?” Madi asks him. It’s too late for them to talk, if you asked society— but society isn’t here, Silver doesn’t sleep, and Madi sometimes wakes in the dead of night. She’s never told Silver about her dreams, but he can imagine them.

Nobody else is sleeping tonight anyway. Around them, fortifications are being checked, songs are being sung, and the bait has been set. They are mere days away from battle.

“If you can change the world, if you can just alter events, why not simply fix it?”

Why let her father die? Why let everyone suffer?

“I’m not a god,” he says.

“I never suggested you were.”

Behind them, someone has found an instrument of some sort. Notes carry just above the clamor of voices.

_“At seven times seven all worldly care began to harbor in my brain—”_

“It’s not that I have a moral opposition to playing God. The world is simply too big.” Silver leans back against a tree, studying the darkness. It fails to provide him answers; just hides the souls getting ready for war.

Oh, he would save them.

If he could he’d crack himself open and protect them all. He’d twist this world into one that would be worthy of them—

And how is it that he started thinking like Flint, when he doesn’t have him?

“When I make a bargain with someone, I have to use a piece of their soul— soul, spirit, whatever it is you want to call it. It’s not precisely a soul how the Christians think of it, but that’s the best word I have in English. It's where you keep your personality, your hopes, your fears. It shows me what you want most, and I can make that come to pass.

“Most of what people want is simple. Individual. The amount of energy and potential it takes to… cure an illness, say. To fix a hurt. It’s small. Because there are simply so many things that can happen to someone— illness grows, or it’s beaten back, guns fire or misfire. When a man asks me to make him king, it’s easy enough to get him on the throne. That’s simply a matter of circumstance. But I can’t make a kingdom loyal to him. I can’t change the minds of all his enemies. And if he’s turned to me, it’s because he doesn’t have the allies, the political acumen, or the resources to do it on his own. If a man becomes king because I made it so, he’s unlikely to stay that way for long.”

Madi sits down on a stump. They’d felled that tree the other day, to build a barricade. “A king can lose his throne, but he cannot come back from the dead. With someone’s spirit, you could kill Woodes Rogers.”

“I could. If you could convince yourself that that was your greatest wish, I could. But it couldn’t guarantee us Nassau. That alone couldn’t accomplish what we’re striving for here.” He gestures to the island, the pirates, the maroons, though the motion is mostly invisible in the dark. “If you want to gain true freedom, if you want to stop the British empire, and every soul on this island wanted that too, enough to give up their afterlife… perhaps I could make a dent. Perhaps I could damage it. But there are thousands of variables that go into the empire. Into the slave trade. And who’s to say that the Spanish wouldn’t rise in their place— or the French, or the Dutch, or the Portuguese? If we want to make change that significant, we have to make it real.”

Standing next to Flint, next to the conviction of Flint’s soul, it had all seemed straightforward. Take Nassau. Start a war. The war will move pieces of empire, and the war will move pieces of the future. Such a thing would be solid— more solid than Silver reaching in and shuffling pieces of reality, even if he could imagine how to do such a thing.

But he isn’t wrong about the variables. About the thousands of people filling a pipe with tobacco, taking sugar with their tea, harboring no desire to change a thing. They don’t care who Madi is, they don’t care who Flint is. The deaths of everyone Silver knows won’t even ripple the surface of the world.

_Can you tell me that what people long for doesn’t usually kill them?_

 

 

xxx.

Woodes lies sick in bed, and tells his men to listen to Eleanor.

She stands over him and wonders if he is meant to die.

But if he did, they would appoint a new governor, and she’s not sure of the reputation she’d get if she seduced the next one. Best to keep him alive.

He already trusts her.

So she acts.

“Are you sure about this?” Max asks. On the road, the wheels of the cart turn, and Charles sways a little with the movement.

“I have to be.” There isn’t room for doubt. _You betrayed everyone who ever loved you._ And it has to mean something. It has to be _for_ something. “If we manage to send him to England, the trial will be a spectacle. Focus attention on Nassau that we neither want nor need. And if he stays here, his release will be something for the pirates to rally around.”

“His death will be something to rally around.”

Everyone dies, here. And the world spins on. Who remembered O’Malley after the first week? Who remembered the men Flint and Silver led to their deaths near St. Augustine? “It’s done. They think I’m a little girl, playing at power.” Max will understand. Max is like her. Haven’t they both betrayed, and been betrayed, by those they love? “This is what happens to my enemies. They need to know it. Jack, Flint, Scott— they need to know that I am capable of doing this, despite the fact that they were my friends. They’ll have to know it if we’re ever to make terms, and if we’re not, they should know not to expect mercy.” 

“Is that wise? Perhaps by sending them this message early, you will lose the chance to negotiate later.”

Perhaps. But as long as Charles is alive, he’ll be a threat. Dead, she can manage the story.

“It’s done,” she says again.

Charles looks at her when he walks off the cart, and she looks back.

 

 

xxxi.

Silver says, “I’m asking you where it actually began,” and Flint slams his shovel into the dirt.

And then he turns around and tells Silver a story.

And Silver listens.

He listens, and he thinks that for all he’s looked at Flint’s soul, he’d never quite understood it. Not until now, little reactions and pieces falling quietly into place.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” Flint says quickly. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure you didn’t already know.”

“I didn’t. But I suppose it explains rather a lot about you.”

Flint leans back a little. There are a dozen questions in tone when he says, “oh?”

“Your hatred of England and English society. Your fear of being seen as the villain. Your refusal to sell your soul, lest it confirm that you’re the monster England told you that you were.”

“There are lots of practical reasons not to sell one’s soul,” Flint says, but he sounds almost fond.

 

 

xxxii.

Silver stands next to Madi, and points a gun.

Somewhere out on the water, Jack will be sailing the _Walrus_ and the Man-of-War into the British line, while Bonny leads their men underneath it.

Somewhere in the woods, Dobbs leads Hornigold right into Flint’s hands.

Across the lake, the lights of souls are going out.

He can’t tell whose are whose, from here.

 

 

xxxiii.

Silver didn’t write the note himself; Eleanor is sure of it. But she supposes it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the name that’s growing in the air. The rumors that it has given life. That John Silver is a king, that John Silver is a demon, that Captain Flint spilled his own blood into the sea and John Silver came out like some piratical Venus to serve at his whim.

What matters is her father, already cold in his bed, his second black spot of the day resting on his pillow.

The last thing Eleanor ever said to him was _it’s a bullshit story,_ and he’d said _I’m not worried about it._

And here he is.

She’d thought, back when there was a possibility that he would be hanged, that she wouldn’t care if her father died. But as she looks at him, she can’t stop thinking about when she was a little girl, sitting by his side while her mother read from a book. The Bible, probably: in her memory, it’s Revelation, but she has no way to know for sure.

No one will ever know. Both her parents are gone, now. 

How odd, to feel herself standing at the end of a legacy. Generations of Guthries and Russells and Buxtons and whomever the fuck else, fucking and marrying until Eleanor Guthrie could be here in Nassau, in the nicest dress she’s ever owned, watching the stillness in her father’s chest.

This is war.

This is what a war is.

Her deal with Silver leaves her Nassau. But she’d been blind, arrogant, to assume that it gives her control of who lives and who dies. To think she could eliminate Charles or Jack, while losing nothing in return.

She gets Nassau.

But she looks at the note again, and wonders if the Caribbean will go to Long John Silver.

 


	5. Chapter Four

i.

Most mornings, Silver gets up with the sun and takes a walk through camp.

Flint is sure that he does it to prove that he’s mobile. To be seen among the men, to be a familiar face among the maroons. To make himself seem industrious and approachable, despite the air of mystery that Billy is attaching to him. The air that he’s carried ever since he stumbled onto Flint’s ship, with bright eyes and a chest that didn’t rise and fall the same way as everyone else’s.

Flint is also sure that Silver does it because he doesn’t sleep.

“Nights get rather tedious,” he tells Flint once. “It’s one thing when we’re on the ship with the men, but I don’t want Madi’s people thinking I’m skulking about at night.”

“You could go on watch more often,” Flint suggests.

“I’m not that desperate. Anyway, Madi is often up late.” 

Flint doesn’t comment on that. It’s not as though he owns Silver’s attention, or is entitled to his time. Silver has been alive for an untold number of years and he’s met an untold number of people and he can spend time where he likes, even if he’s the quartermaster on Flint’s ship and he’s become Flint’s right hand in this war and quite possibly his only friend and he’s been busy building a name for himself—

Anyway.

He doesn’t comment.

The alliance is important. Whatever is going on between them can only strengthen it.

Regardless, their relationship may not be what it seems. Silver looks like a man, walks like a man, talks like a man— but he isn’t one. For all Flint knows, he’s incapable of such attachments. Feelings. Activities.

He could ask, he supposes. It might even be justified. But he can easily picture Silver’s smirk in response— _are you asking me if I have a cock?_

Right.

Flint definitely isn’t going to ask.

“You could at least do something useful,” he says one day, and calls Silver up to the cliffs where he’s stuck two swords in the dirt.

“I know how to fight.”

“You know how to kill and run away,” Flint counters. “This is different. You might have a dozen sets of instincts inside you, all urging you in different directions. You need to understand what you’re doing before it’s life or—” or _death,_ he’d been about to say, but he has seen no evidence that Silver can die. “Loss of limb.”

“Not eager to do that again,” Silver agrees, and picks up the sword.

 

 

ii.

It takes Silver several tries to get his blade to Flint’s neck, and when he does, Flint smiles.

“I did say you were teaching me how to defeat you,” Silver points out.

“You know my story. You can see my soul. Surely you always knew how.” Flint puts his hand on Silver’s shoulder— a friendly gesture, he’s sure of it, but it makes his chest hurt all the same.

It’s been a long time since Silver asked for Flint’s soul.

 

 

iii.

They sail for Nassau, the world falls to pieces around them, and Silver sees Madi’s face in the boat for just a moment before he sinks.

It’s quiet, down here. It’s peaceful.

For a moment, he understands why Flint let himself fall under Spanish guns.

He could stay here for years, until Nassau moves on, until the responsibility is lifted from his shoulders and he can be no one again. He could walk onto the beach one day with a different face and go back to drifting.

Or he could lie here at the bottom of the sea until he’s all used up, until his form falls apart from lack of souls and he turns to nothing. He could—

He could leave Flint and Madi up there alone.

_They’ll die._

Someone on the island knows their routes, their spies, has intercepted whatever warning Billy must have sent them about this. Flint and Madi are going to be walking into danger, and Silver can’t leave them there.

There’s something warm on his shoulder, where Flint had touched him that day on the cliffs.

Silver becomes a little less solid, and starts to swim.

The iron leg falls to the bottom.

 

 

iv.

“The rest are presumed dead or captured.”

Billy looks at their faces. Their pathetic, motley crew. Men that Flint would trade in a heartbeat for— but he won’t have to.

“And Silver? Which is he?”

 

 

v.

He’s never before appreciated the warm sand against his hands. Or air. He’s never needed air, but it feels nice, even as the salt dries to his skin. Silver rolls over, just to get a look at the sky, and sees half a dozen musket barrels pointed at him.

They haul him up, and he really misses being able to run.

He could just pull out of the chains they put him in and run towards Flint. If he’s insubstantial enough, he can move on one leg— but he can’t go fast, and all he would do would be to lead the redcoats along with him.

Not to mention—

“Put him with the rest,” the redcoat in charge says. He’s a blond man with a curl to his lip and a face that must have been a disappointment to his family. Silver doesn’t look to see if his soul matches, because _the rest_ suggests that they have more of his men, and if Silver plays the human cripple, they might just leave him with them unsupervised.

Flint will manage without him.

He’ll know Silver is alive.

 

 

vi.

“That is not what Silver would want,” Flint says.

Billy raises a gun. “No, it’s not what _you_ want. You don’t know what Silver wants, because he isn’t here. You don’t really know if he’s coming back.”

Flint knows.

Nothing can drown a man who doesn't need to breathe.

Madi whistles. 

 

 

vii.

Dirt from the Underhill plantation has worked its way in between Flint’s toes, and it’s starting to itch.

“If we were able to take Nassau, if we were able to expose the illusion that England is not inevitable, if we are able to incite a revolt that spreads across the New World… then, yeah, I imagine people are gonna notice.”

“Too much sanity may be madness,” Madi quotes, “and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

For a moment, Flint is no longer on New Providence Island. He’s in Thomas’s study, and Miranda is handing him a book in a language he doesn’t speak, smiling a smile he’s only just beginning to learn. A decade and four thousand miles behind him, but he wonders, not for the first time, what Miranda and Madi would think of each other.

What Miranda would think of where he stands now.

 _That is what civilization is,_ Peter had said, but God, it doesn’t have to be.

“Silver told me you enjoy reading,” Flint says, because he and Madi have shed the blood of Flint’s former brothers together, and that makes them more than they were yesterday.

“He said the same about you.” Madi turns to him again. “Eme works in the tavern— perhaps she’s heard about his whereabouts, if he’s still alive.”

“He’s alive.” He cannot doubt this. “And he knows where the house is.” The bigger concern is Billy finding him first, telling him who knows what about Flint and Madi— but Silver knows them both well. They have spent months together. Surely, he’ll be able to see the truth.

Unable to stand it anymore, Flint leans up against the ruined stone wall and pulls off his boot.

“Are you a believer, Captain?” Madi asks.

Thomas had been, even as he scorned the hypocrisies of God’s representatives. Miranda had kept a Bible, had learned it backwards and forwards, but Flint suspects it was more so that she could reinforce her arguments.

He wonders what Silver believes in.

“I believe in what we’re trying to accomplish here,” he says, giving the boot a good shake. “I believe that it’s possible. I believe that nothing in the world is as permanent as we think. As for God, as for angels and miracles…” he looks at her, where she’s set alight by the sun. “Silver is the closest to any of those I’ve ever seen. I suppose I believe in him.”

 

 

viii.

They don’t put him in with his men.

Instead, Silver is given his own cell in the fort, and a short chain around his ankle.

“Do you expect me to run?” he asks, giving the captain— whose name, he has learned, is Berringer— the same smile he’d given Billy and Gates, all that time ago. It sits differently on his face, now.

Berringer just sneers, slamming the door behind him.

Lovely.

There’s a rat sniffing about, inching closer as if it thinks Silver has something to feed it. Maybe some of the other prisoners have. Dead men’s final acts living on in the body of a rodent.

Not him. He can get out of here. There are no windows, and the door looks like it holds tight to the floor, but there must be a crack somewhere. It’ll take a long time, and he'll risk a good amount of himself dissipating into thin air, but he’ll be able to make it through eventually. Maybe he can even steal the keys, free the rest of the men— but he’ll have to become flesh to hold the keys, so he should figure out where he’s going and how many men they have first, lest he get himself stabbed along the way.

And he won’t have the chance to learn any of that until someone comes to talk to him.

But he is Long John Silver, and he won’t have to wait. He can feel her getting closer.

When she enters, her hair is loose and impractical, and she’s wearing a dress Silver is sure she wouldn’t have even looked at a year ago. She might imagine she’s someone else, but she carries herself the same way.

She closest the door. “John Silver.”

They regard each other for a moment.

“People don’t say my name like that much anymore,” Silver says.

“Right. _Long_ John Silver. Quite a name. I imagine you didn’t come up with it yourself.”

“Wouldn’t carry the same weight if I did, would it?”

“Mm.” She shifts her weight from foot to foot, a bit like Muldoon’s little sister had when she was about to ask for something. “Pardon me, but what the hell are you doing?”

Right now, he’s sitting in a cell, wondering if he would have been better off waiting under the sea. “Excuse me?”

Eleanor walks farther into the cell, eyes fixed somewhere just above Silver’s head. The piece of her soul in his chest is twisting. “Did Flint sell you his as well?”

“No.”

“His men?”

“Not currently,” Silver says. “Strange, isn’t it? That I might have chosen a side myself?”

She looks at him, now. Not flinching away even as Silver’s eyes turn empty. “Is that what you did?”

Isn’t it? He’d stood at Flint’s side, and he’s never really considered leaving it, even when he stole the gold. Even last night, under the ocean, he’d only been able to entertain the thought for a moment.

“I chose to follow Flint, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. Because he is my friend. And is it so hard to believe that I think he’s right? I am made of the desperation people have been driven to under the rule of Empire. Yourself included. Is this how you want to hold onto power, Eleanor? Making decisions from behind a man, dictating to people who call you his whore behind your back?”

“I don’t give a shit what they call me.” She does give a shit. “And he’s in the process of divorcing his wife. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“So you’ll marry him? ‘Push children out until one of them kills you,’ wasn’t that your fear? You’ll give him the titles to your tavern, to your shipping company—”

“—And what about Flint’s world?” Eleanor cuts in. “You weren’t there. Flint wasn’t there, and I had to make a choice. I’ve made it. There’s no turning around now— if I joined your side, I could get a knife in my back from either direction. I bound myself to my chair until I die, but I can’t imagine that if Flint and Scott had their way, they’d ever let me sit in it.”

“Scott’s dead.” The grief he’d felt, that need to save him— how had it taken Silver this long to realize that was Eleanor?

“What?”

“He was shot as he escaped Nassau. He died some weeks later— his daughter is leading their forces.”

The bit of Eleanor twists again. The rest of her goes back to pacing in front of the door. Unable to sit still, as he’s sure she’s been sitting still for months.

“It’s true, then? Madi’s alive?”

If she made it from the boat to the beach, and from the beach to safety— but she must be alive. Because Flint is alive: Silver can feel that, feel _him,_ moving around the interior of the island. And Flint wouldn’t let Madi die.

He nods.

“I’ve been trying to reconcile it, the man I thought I knew to the one who was working behind my back. I suppose I can’t blame him, can I? I’ve betrayed everyone, Scott included. I might have betrayed his people, if I could have gotten something out if it. And I don’t feel bad about it. Because Flint would have done the same, and he _has_ his soul.”

Silver wants to say it’s not true. But he’s seen Flint send men to be slaughtered— baiting Dufresne into a losing battle. Firing on his own home. Letting men die to lure Hornigold into the woods.

But Silver helped him do most of those things, and he’s got a dozen souls.

“Flint has a purpose,” he says instead, and she scoffs.

“Flint will leave you here to rot. You’ll be a great martyr for the cause.”

He won’t. “You really think you can keep me here?” Silver asks.

“Your men said you were made of smoke, but even smoke can’t pass through solid walls. I can board up every hole, every crack in this cell. Seal off the door and not let anyone enter. Perhaps, one day, we’ll forget you’re even here at all.”

“You wouldn’t.” Not out of kindness, necessarily, but he doesn't think she could resist the temptation of asking him to meddle. 

“You promised me Nassau, and what I got was a war-torn island. One that I literally can’t survive losing.” She raps on the door, waiting for the guard outside to open it. “Don’t tell me what I would and wouldn’t do.”

They lock the door behind her.

 

 

ix.

Philadelphia.

She’d never thought she’d set foot in the city unless she failed in Nassau, and it’s almost infuriating to think it might be the only thing that could save them.

Woodes’s face is warm under her hands. “Don’t let them catch you,” she says.

 

 

x.

“Eme says the governor has left town. Sailed off, with Rackham in pursuit. She also says they’re planning to hang the pirate prisoners in the square tomorrow— Long John Silver included.” Madi delivers all this information with barely a change in facial expression.

“Well,” Dooley says. “They’ll have a right shock when he doesn’t die.”

“Or when he slips through the noose,” Adams adds. Or at least, that’s what Flint thinks he said— he’d spat out some fish bones mid-sentence, making it sound like _fffipfs through tha nooth._

Dooley stands up on one foot, spreading his hands in an apologetic gesture. “Sorry, Mr. Hangman, sir, are you sure you tied it correctly?”

The men laugh, but it’s not an easy laugh. There are over a hundred men who won’t be able to escape.

“Eleanor and Max know that hanging won’t kill him,” Madi says. She still hasn’t sat down in their patch or dirt or taken the food that’s been offered. “If they’re truly bringing him out, then it’s bait.”

And it’s bait that Flint is going to take. “The rest of our men are already bait. This isn’t for us, it’s for everyone who has been listening to the stories of Long John Silver these last few months. The question is, what does Eleanor think she’s going to accomplish? She knows he isn’t going to hang. She must know that.” She shouldn’t even want him to. Unless she has regrets? Does she think that will get her out of her deal?

Perhaps she’s realized that she’s trapped herself: that  _Nassau for the rest of her life_ means that there is no safe retreat. Perhaps she wants to leave Nassau behind.

Still. He expected better from the woman who matched his nearly every move in the woods of Maroon Island.

“We’re going to go get them, right?” Dooley asks.

They have about fifty men left, without Billy’s help. But if they can get into the square, if they can free the men held prisoner there, they might be able to triple the number. And Silver’s necessity is non-negotiable.

“We’re going,” Flint agrees.

 

 

xi.

When the men come, it’s not to cover the cracks. These redcoats have no fear of him: one yanks him up by his collar, forcing him to hop along the hallways. Silver likes to think they don’t give him a walking stick because they fear what he could do with it, but Berringer probably just likes walking him struggle.

They throw him into a cart with some of his men, and that almost makes it worth it. It’s the first cart of five, and there must be at least three dozen pirates and maroons there total.

The gallows will be busy today.

“Shit,” Howell says, relief and dismay tangled up in the word. “They said they’d caught you, but we hoped they were lying.”

“Couldn’t leave you sorry lot on your own, could I?” Silver asks. “I thought Miss Guthrie wasn’t sending me to hang with the others.” He directs the last words to Berringer, casual as he thinks a man could be about his own execution.

Berringer looks up from where he’s consulting with the driver, lip curling again. “Yes, all the women were very anxious that you be kept inside.”

Spite, then. Going against orders. Silver raises an eyebrow. “Well, I like to think that most women in the world would prefer that I live.”

The redcoats don’t look amused, but behind him, Colin chuckles.

 

 

xii.

Eleanor doesn’t look like the frightened woman from last night, not in the light of day. She has an expression that Silver thinks he’s seen on Flint’s face.

As soon as Berringer dismounts, she’s over muttering to him about something. Neither look happy, and Silver smiles just enough to make it look like he’s plotting something.

The square is emptier than he’d expected it to be, for something like this. Nothing like the crowd Billy says showed up for Vane. Perhaps the people are tired of hangings. Or perhaps it’s something else.

“Here he is!” Berringer shouts to the dozen or so people who are still lurking about. Two women step away from a balcony, pretending they hadn’t been paying attention.

He has this town in his fist, Berringer does.

Silver thinks he’ll enjoy taking it back.

“Long John Silver! The demon pirate king.”

Eleanor scowls, saying something again to Berringer in an undertone. Whatever he says in response makes her hurry over to her maid. They leave the square as quickly as they can without looking like they’re hurrying.

She knows Flint is coming.

Flint is coming and all Silver has to do is wait until he gets here.

“Captain Berringer,” he says, matching the contempt as loudly as he can. “The deserter. I’ve heard about you. Abandoned your post, ignored your orders, inspired your men to mutiny against the crown. You would have made a good pirate.”

A young woman edges out from behind one of the buildings, scratching the back of her head before hurrying up some stairs. But Silver doesn’t need the signal.

“I said I’d be here until I saw you defeated, and I intend to honor that word.” Berringer snaps his fingers at one of the soldiers. “Get him up.”

Colin moves like he’s going to defend him, but Silver catches his arm. “Be ready,” he whispers, and then there are hands yanking him out of the cart, pushing him up towards the gallows. Three nooses hang, but no men are put forward with him.

They could have at least given him a stick. Instead, he’s half carried up the steps, left to hold onto his own rope for balance as they tie it.

 _Can’t hurt me,_ he tells himself, because something like a heart has started racing in his chest and his palms aren’t sweaty but they feel like they should be. 

“Don’t I get last words?” he asks.

A vein pulses in Berringer’s forehead.

He knows Flint is coming, too.

“Ten seconds.”

_Can’t hurt me._

He wishes he could say _look behind you,_ just for the poetry of it all. But Flint isn’t here yet, and the only way Silver can think to stall for time is to play his hand.

_Can’t hurt me._

“I hope you’re very patient,” he says, and then there’s a foot against his back and he’s falling forwards, rope yanked tight around his neck.

It hurts. His body jerks, foot scrambling for a ground that is no longer under him— _can’t hurt me can’t hurt men can’t hurt me—_

But they’re almost here.

“You probably should have listened to Miss Guthrie, Captain Berringer,” Silver says. He has no control over how he swings, but he cranes his neck around as best he can, giving the waiting pirates a smile. “She did warn you.”

Flint steps out from between two buildings, and he might be the most beautiful thing Silver has ever seen.

 

 

xiii.

 _Bethlem Royal Hospital,_ Miranda says.

A gunshot goes off in Peter’s house.

Silver is already hanging.

Flint wonders if they can feel his hatred across the square. Wonders if they can see Death standing over his shoulder, because he feels her there, the shadowy figure that lurks around the edges of his dreams. They hanged Silver, and they deserve to live just long enough to regret it.

The redcoats line up just past the gallows, uniformed and interchangeable. Silver will be able to see the difference, but Silver isn’t looking at them. His eyes are on Flint. On Dooley and Kofi stepping up behind him, drawing the soldiers’ attention while their other men get into position.

“Company, fall into two ranks!” someone shouts.

Behind Flint, Madi’s whistle echoes off the buildings.

Flint gives Silver a nod.

He looks so much like flesh and blood that Flint sometimes forgets that he’s really made from dreams and smoke, but it’s impossible not to see that now: he drops out of the noose like it was never there in the first place, landing on one foot with barely a wobble. 

Kofi mutters something, but Flint can’t tell if it’s a blessing or a curse.

“Come on,” Flint mutters, as though Silver can hear him. “Hurry.”

But Silver doesn’t seem inclined to hurry. He propels himself forward like Charon punting a boat across the River Styx, despite the black coat that should be pulling him down. 

He is not far, but it feels like a very long way.

“If they shoot him,” Kofi says, “will it—”

A shot rings out and Miranda falls— but the bullet passes through Silver, tearing through his clothes. It lands at Flint’s feet, and Silver doesn’t waver.

He turns instead, giving the British men another long, empty gaze.

And then he continues.

Not even the birds dare make noise.

Closer, closer, and then he’s in front of Flint. His eyes are still smoke, but sharper, somehow, than Flint has ever seen him: he knows that Silver can’t really see his face like this, yet he meets Flint’s eyes all the same.

Flint wants to put his hands on Silver’s shoulders, his arms, reassure himself that he’s as real as he appears to be. He wants to hold him, feel the sun-warmed leather of his coat, wants to press his finger against the bullet hole where a faint wisp of smoke is lingering.

He wants to kiss him.

Oh, God, he wants to kiss him.

Wants to put his mouth on Silver’s and find out what’s behind it when he’s stopped pretending to be human. Wants to get drunk on the feel of it. Wants to know him, this impossible man, who has forged a self out of other peoples’ history.

Instead, he holds out a crutch.

Silver takes it, and for a moment his hands wrap around Flint’s— and then he is solid, and Flint’s fingers burn where they touch him.

He lets go.

“I hope you also brought me a sword,” Silver says, and Flint tries not to smile because they are still on the edge of battle. He gives Silver the sword, and this time their hands don't meet. 

“Are you alright?” Of course Silver isn’t alright. He’s too still, too calm.

“I’ll have to patch this coat, I suppose. But I’m fine. There are about forty of our men chained up in that building there, and more locked under the fort."

Flint looks to Madi, and she whistles again.

“Present!” Berringer shouts, clearly recovering himself, and Flint doesn’t need to tell his men to do the same. They’re already moving, pistols out, swords up, hearts full with whatever they think they just witnessed. A man hanged, and he walked away on one leg. And that man is on their side.

They are invincible.

He and Berringer give the order to fire, and it begins.

 

 

 

xiv.

“I just thought you should know,” Silver says, watching Billy’s men join Flint’s, souls scattering to the winds, “that today is the first time I’ve killed anyone with a sword since I first came to Nassau.”

Berringer gurgles.

His blood drips onto the street.

 

 

xv.

“I don’t understand,” Colin says. “Why’d Flint bring you that crutch, if you don’t need one?”

Silver wedges said crutch more firmly under his arm. A few feet away, a redcoat with a bag over his head is shot. “I do need it.”

“We just saw you walk across the whole square, moving a whole lot better than most men on two legs.”

“That’s because I wasn’t solid, Colin.” He might, at this rate, develop a real actual headache. The ground is slick with blood under him, and is this what victory looks like? Is this what they were fighting for? “How am I supposed to swing a sword if I’m not solid?” he wiggles the sword to make a point.

“Oh. Right. But, uh, if you don’t mind me asking—” and Silver gets the sense that he is very much going to mind— “How come your clothes stay on?”

“Colin!” someone shouts. “Give me a hand, here!”

Colin stops to help relieve a dead man of his boots, and Silver continues on.

Most of the men step out of his way as he passes, though he’s careful to keep his eyes looking normal. He doesn’t want to see what these souls look like, dying in the street. It’s screaming and chaos and surely there must be an answer. Surely they haven’t won for this.

Flint is still in the governor’s mansion, arguing with Tom Morgan. Morgan looks to Silver for confirmation of whatever Flint has said, and Silver gives it. 

The captains scatter, and Silver lowers his voice. “It’s chaos out there.”

“All new life starts in violence and screaming,” Flint says. “It will pass.”

“A lot of things end that way, too. But I admire your optimism.” And it _is_ optimism: Silver can feel it when Flint is close, a faint echo of how he can feel Eleanor’s fear when she’s nearby. He’d known Flint was alive, known Flint was coming for him, but he certainly hasn’t bought Flint’s soul. It’s just as bright as it always was.

It’s a mystery for later, because Dooley is back with talk of a prisoner exchange, and Silver sends him to find Billy.

“I know you were worried about your display back there,” Flint says quietly, “but it might work out for the best. No one is going to disobey you for a long while, yet.”

Later, when he threatens Billy, he tries not to feel too good about it.

 

 

xvi.

Max watches him as though he’s something dangerous.

Silver settles into a chair, and watches her back for the same reason.

“I’ve been puzzling over something,” he says. “Maybe you could help me. Yesterday, Eleanor implied that she was planning to leave me in a cell until you all died of old age. Earlier today, Captain Berringer removed me from that cell and sent me to hang.”

“He wanted a fight. Eleanor didn’t.”

“Yes, yes. I got that. But moving me— he said that _all the women_ had asked him not to. There aren’t any other women who might get a say in the matter, which makes me think you voiced the same concern.”

“I did.” She hunches near the window, next to where Eleanor had signed away her life. What a room this is, Silver thinks. What a goddamned place.

“I had a good long look at Berringer’s soul, while he was leaving me to hang. What seems interesting to me is that a man like Berringer is not one that can be reasoned with. Certainly not one who likes to be argued with. Especially by a woman. But you must know this: you don’t need to look at a man’s soul to read him. So why did you make the argument in the first place, knowing full well it might provoke the opposite reaction?”

“If at first you don’t succeed,” Max says, “try try again.”

“Please. Let’s not insult the both of us. You wanted me out of that fort. You goaded him into bringing me out of that fort. Why?” She doesn’t move, and Silver sits up straighter. “What is going on up there?”

Max is silent for a long moment, watching whatever is happening on the street. Silver doesn’t look, but he assumes that it’s bloody. “I am tired of this,” she says eventually. “The lying, the killing, the violence. The men who have defined themselves by this conflict, and won’t let it end, uncaring who they destroy. I have no interest in watching it continue. I have no interest in watching my town be ruled by fear, no matter who wields it. Keeping you in that fort, a temptation to ambitious men, would not allow any of this to end. Not only that, but I would have to live with the knowledge that we were leaving you to starve to nothing. For a man who needs others as you do, I can think of no greater torture, and I did not want to live with that on my conscience. I advised Eleanor to send you away from here, to a plantation I know of in the colonies where noble families in London have been known to hide inconvenient relatives: I knew it wouldn’t hold you forever, but you might have been content, living among desperate souls whose ambitions involved less bloodshed. But she wouldn’t do it.”

“So you sought the second-best solution. You baited Berringer into removing me from the fort, making Berringer the one who went against his orders and allowed a valuable prisoner to escape. If I hadn’t killed him, Eleanor would have just grounds to dismiss him from the governor’s service.” Silver thinks of Dufresne, standing on the deck of a prize ship, trying to look taller than he was. “If Eleanor hadn’t sold her soul, you would have been running Nassau a long time ago, wouldn’t you.”

She shrugs. “I suppose we will never know.”

 

 

xvii. 

“Before whatever is going to happen here happens,” Silver says, “I need you to go to a plantation in Savannah. And I need you to ask them about a man.”

 

 

xviii.

The fort is cool, and quiet, and not remotely peaceful. Peace isn’t possible: not on this island, and not within herself. If Eleanor closes her eyes, she can imagine she’s in this same fort with Charles— or visiting Hornigold— or looking around it as a child, searching for places to hide.

Is this what death feels like? Quiet, terrifying violence?

“I couldn’t find anything sharp enough to make the cut,” she tells Max, and it feels like the truest thing she’s said in months.

“For a long time, I told myself that was because of your bargain,” Max says quietly. “I told myself that Eleanor— the _real_ Eleanor— would have left with me. That she loved me enough. That she would never have done the things you have, so she must have killed herself in her search for power.”

Isn’t that what she tried to do? Eleanor had signed herself away with barely a thought to the consequences, because it had seemed like the only way forward.

“But then the governor arrived. Then I convinced Anne to hand over the cache, to betray Jack. Then I intercepted a message, orchestrating the deaths of over a hundred men. Many of whom I knew. I always thought that people who did things like that were monstrous— but I had good reasons for doing what I did, and I do not think I am monstrous. And I don’t think you are either. I think you’ve told yourself that you can’t love, that the only thing that matters is power, that there is no life for you without Nassau, because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to live with the choices you’ve made.” Max turns to look at her again, only half visible in the light. Eleanor wants to tell her to stop talking, to take all of her opinions and shove them up her ass, and— “You traded twenty prisoners for my safety. You worry now about the fate of the governor. You tell yourself you have practical reasons for doing so— but you are grieving Mr. Scott, even knowing that he lied to you. You grieved for your father, even though you hated him. You are glad Madi and Flint are alive, even knowing they are fighting against you.”

“Stop it,” Eleanor says.

“You may tell yourself whatever stories you like, but I know the truth. And I still recognize you.” Max stands, taking her plate with her to the door, and Eleanor watches her go. Tries to remember the feeling of loving her, alight with reckless youth. Tries to remember what it felt like to seek out Charles. To hide her face in Scott’s shoulder when she missed her mother.

She’s not sure Max is right.

She’s not sure anything has felt right since she met Silver— and what does that mean for the rest of her life?

This can’t be it, can it?

Trying to build Nassau into something, only to have it torn down, and she unable to turn away lest she die? Unable to enjoy it, or share it with anyone, for she has killed Charles and left Max to love another and Woodes can never know the truth of her.

Mrs. Hudson knocks on the stone doorframe. “Sails have been spotted, ma’am.”

 

 

xix.

“My men can hold this beach,” Billy says. Flint nods, mostly to get him to leave. Which he does. So that’s one problem solved.

“Can you honestly look at the men here and tell me that nine of ten of them won’t start running the second Rogers hits the sand?” he asks Silver. “They’re currently riding high on your display from this morning, but it’s only been a day. They’re tired.”

Silver’s eyes turn black as he looks at Rogers’s ship, but Flint doesn’t know if he can see anything from here, or if it’s just a habit. It’s always a bit mesmerizing to watch them clear, the way the way the smoke swirls in on itself as it solidifies.

“His men are probably tired, too. Whatever happened out there, I can’t imagine Anne Bonny went down without a fight,” Silver says.

That’s true. “If Rackham’s crew is all dead, they probably took out a lot of the governor’s men along the way. If they’re prisoners, then he’s taking a big risk, bringing them here— if his own ship is still seaworthy, the smart move would have been to leave the prisoners on it. Along with some of his men, to bring them to a friendly port for trial.”

Silver nods. “So that means…”

“He might not have very men at all.” They had barely managed to sail that warship with thirty men, and there’s a chance Rogers doesn’t have many more. How many had he set out with? Fifty, at the very most? He likely lost some to battle or injury, and either some are down below guarding the prisoners, or even more were left behind to sail the other ship.

“He’s not a fool, though. He wouldn’t sail straight for us if he didn’t think the guns from the fort would protect him. Keep us from organizing ourselves down here.”

He’s right.

“How many men of ours do you think are left in the fort?” Eleanor knows about the tunnels, and the whole town now knows about Silver.

“I don’t know. Forty, perhaps? Fifty?”

They probably have an hour, hour and a half before the warship will be in range and the beach will be covered in blood.

 

 

xx.

Silver stands alone on the sand.

But he’s not really alone, is he? And isn’t that a thought. This morning he’d been alone in a cell, and now he has an army at his back.

And Flint.

And somewhere in the interior is Madi. If this doesn’t go well, she should have time to get to safety.

He doesn’t need to breathe, but he takes a breath anyway. Lets the air go through him. Lets go of the ground, of form, as best he can— he plants his crutch in the sand and then he pushes himself forward.

Crossing the square had been one thing. An effort in concentration, certainly, but one that could be conducted with enough mass to remain more or less solid. But here on the water, he must become as close to nothing as he dares. 

Or to answer Colin’s earlier question: he is not, technically, wearing clothes anymore. He’d left his coat and an extra pair of trousers behind one of their hastily constructed barricades, and he really hopes they survive the encounter, because his shirt and pants are sinking into the sea. With something like a sigh, Silver lets his lower half turn to smoke.

 _Stay together,_ he thinks. 

And then he walks on water.

 

xxi.

Half an hour earlier, Flint had been hiding outside the entrance to one of the tunnels, wishing he could see what was happening inside. Silver had been stepping in between the bars of the metal grate, walking as one of the shadows in the dark.

If Flint were a better man, he’d hate the warmth he feels when Silver kills for him.

But he’s not.

Within a few minutes, he heard the screech of the gate opening. The uneven hop of Silver’s footfalls.

There was blood on his clothes when he emerged.

“It’s done.” He took his crutch back from Flint. “There were four guards, about fifteen feet past the gate. Mind you don’t trip.”

“Hang on,” Dooley had said. “You’re not coming with us?”

“If we were going to launch a surprise attack on the fort, surely you wouldn’t do it without me,” Silver said.

“Surely.”

“So if I am clearly visible on the beach, then we definitely aren’t planning a sneak attack on the fort.” He’d nodded once, squinting against the sunlight, and Flint tries not to think about Silver being locked in there just this morning. About what he’d said Eleanor had threatened to do.

Separating again didn’t feel like the right answer.

But Silver can lead the men down below— Billy won’t argue with him, like he does with Flint, and Flint doesn’t trust his men to enter the fort unsupervised.

Silver climbed back on his horse.

“Make sure you get out of there,” he’d said, like he was really saying something else.

“Don’t get shot,” Flint had said back. He'd wanted to touch Silver, then, and worked hard to keep his hands at his sides. 

Now, climbing through the passageways with a dozen men being mostly quiet behind him, Flint wonders if that was a mistake. Because somewhere below, Silver is on the water, staring down the fucking warship, and Flint is in a death trap.

A rock skitters under someone’s foot, and someone else hisses, _“Quiet!”_

Around the next corner is the flicker of a torch.

Flint charges.

 

xxii.

The thing Silver didn’t tell Flint is:

He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, if he actually gets hit with a cannonball.

Bullets are small. Uncomfortable, but small. But Vane’s men had taken off his leg with a blade, and in his panic Silver had been forced to remain flesh. A cannon, hitting him directly, might cause him to simply scatter.

At least there’s always the other option.

The men on board have spotted him: they’re close enough now that Silver can see the fear. Someone shoots a musket, and it goes wide, because they’re not pirates used to shooting from a moving ship.

Silver waits until he’s sure all their eyes are on him, and then he sinks.

 

 

xxiii.

The next corridor has cells full of Flint’s men, and only two guards.

There is no reason for there to be more. The fight is on the beach, today. The fight is on the water. The fight is where Silver is, because today, he is the leader and Flint is the shadow.

He drops the second guard, and it takes almost thirty seconds for Flint to realize that Dooley is dead, a sword in his gut and his blood on the stones.

Joji unlocks the cells, and one of Madi’s men picks up Dooley’s sword. He nods at Flint, and Flint nods back.

 

 

xxiv.

He comes in through the gun port, giving the wood as much of a pat as he can when he doesn’t really have hands.

“We have to stop meeting like this.”

The ship doesn’t answer him, and no one else does either: the gun deck is deserted, confirming their earlier suspicions.

“—the launch!” someone is shouting above him.

“All due respect, Governor,” another man says, voice hardly warped through the wood separating him from Silver, “we don’t know where he is under there, and you want to put us closer to him?”

“If he had the power to attack the ship, he would. Instead he’s just trying to frighten us into staying on it. Make. Ready. The launch.”

Footsteps beat out a tattoo above him, and Silver moves as quickly as he can through the ship. Vane had knocked some walls out, but it still looks more or less the same as it did when Silver was getting punched in the gut by the crew, trying to make them like him. 

God, how long ago was that?

Rackham and Bonny aren’t down here, that’s obvious enough. If he ever sees Rackham alive again, Silver will be sure to tell him that he checked— Rackham will be touched.

Overhead, ropes creak.

There’s still been no signal from the fort.

Shit.

Silver drops back out the gun port, hitting the water louder than he’d meant to.

“—was that?” a man is shouting, and Silver positions himself just under the longboat, giving them his most Flint-inspired brooding look.

A grown man screams.

 

 

xxv.

The governor’s council is holed up in one of the side rooms: Flint sees Eleanor for just a second as he and the men run past, having long since given up on sneaking.

“Keep going!” he snaps at the few men who have slowed down. The cannons haven’t fired yet, but they can’t risk giving them more time to prepare— someone has started shouting, and Flint slows just enough to let another man be the first on the wall. That man falls instantly, body slumping into Flint, who reaches around it to shoot whoever had fired first.

There are barely half a dozen men up here.

Their bodies are tossed over the edge.

“Fire a three-gun salute,” Flint orders. “Tell Silver we’ve won.”

 

 

xxvi.

Eleanor herds the governor’s council, Max, and Mrs. Hudson down one of the tunnels, cursing with every single step.

 _Fuck_ Flint, _fuck_ Silver, _fuck_ Woodes for leaving her here, _fuck_ every member of this stupid council that can’t be arsed to move faster or stop complaining with ever step. Fuck everyone in the world, for that matter.

“Maybe our men will hold the fort,” Fraiser says.

“We have lost.” It’s Max who speaks, and Eleanor amends her earlier sentiment: fuck everybody except for Max. “If we stay, it would be as their prisoners.”

“As opposed to getting killed on the street?”

“If you’d like to be the one they hang tomorrow, be my fucking guest,” Eleanor says. “Or you can shut up and let me save your asses.”

Mercifully, they shut up. They don’t have any torches with them, so Eleanor tries to count the footsteps to make sure they haven’t left anyone behind. She’s going to need as many of them as she can.

The pirates must have come in through the south tunnel, to have freed the prisoners, so she’d taken the north one, counting on there still being guards at the end— and she’s right. They’re still facing outward, unaware that they’ve already lost what they were meant to guard.

But they come with Eleanor when she tells them to, stepping out into the field.

They all stand rubbing their eyes in the sun, trying to blink away the spots after nearly a day in the darkness of the fort, the blackness of the tunnels. If the fort was what death felt like, perhaps this is rebirth. 

Because she has a plan.

Max meets her eyes, and there’s a question on her face.

 

 

xxvii.

Rogers turns around the warship when he sees the flag, and Silver hops naked up the beach.

It’s, perhaps, not his finest moment. But considering he just spent an hour being the stuff of nightmares, he might need to be humbled. 

God, he’s tired. He feels like he just shoved himself through a keyhole, and he feels a lot less of Benjamin and Kayode than he had before. 

Billy and Ben step forward to meet him. Ben always looks wide-eyed, but he’s going to go blind if he keeps it up, bright as it is.

“I’ll take some men and meet Flint at the fort in the morning,” Silver tells Billy. He wants to be there earlier, but the sun is setting, and there are practicalities to consider. “Tell Madi to meet us when she returns— your men will hold the beach?”

“We will.” Billy is keeping his eyes fixed firmly on Silver’s face. Ben bows a little bit when he presents Silver’s trousers, like they’re some sort of offering, and he sits down in the sand. Putting them on is never particularly dignified, but no one seems to want to look directly at him.

He’s not sure he likes the feeling.

 

 

xxviii.

Eleanor hasn’t been in this house since her argument with the late Mrs. Barlow, but someone else has. Fortifications have been built around the edges of the yard, the dishes are left haphazard and broken, and there’s a smear of gunpowder on the table.

Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to her that Flint would let his crew in here. He’d held this place sacred, had been furious when Vane’s men had discovered it— and yet Billy Bones and his outlaws had probably lived here for months.

Perhaps he was desperate. Or perhaps he isn’t as sentimental a man as he sometimes seemed.

For her own sake, she hopes it’s the first.

And so she settles in to wait.

 

 

xxix.

Flint meets him in a room off the courtyard, and Silver wants to collapse with relief: he can walk on water, but the idea of stairs had made him want to lie down and not move for at least two years. As it is, he sways a little when he gets inside: partly from exhaustion, and partly because he knows Flint will catch his arm when he does.

“You didn’t say it would take this much out of you,” he says, concerned.

Of course it does— smoke turns to nothing in the air. “It’s nothing,” Silver says, when what he wants to say is _I never feel more solid than when you’re touching me_. Flint’s hand on his elbow steadies him, strengthens him, and he can’t figure out _why_.

He wants to hold onto him and find out, spend the rest of this war pressed against Flint’s side, but that’s childish, and he’s never been a child.

“I have some experience with playing the monster. I can’t say it’s ever been nothing.”

“Nothing that has to be solved now,” Silver amends. Though it wouldn’t hurt to eat sometime soon, especially if he’s going to be doing this more often: he's been too busy being a pirate king to find contracts, but he shouldn't have any trouble after today. And speaking of— “You’re aware that Eleanor Guthrie is not in this fort, correct?”

Flint nods. “She fled, along with Max and the governor’s council and whichever guards were posted at the northern tunnel. I sent a scout out to look for them.”

“No need.” He can place her fairly easily on his mental map of the island. “I think she wants to talk.”

 

 

xxx.

She was expecting Flint to enter as a storm: fling open the door, flanked by imposing-looking men with pistols and swords, stomp forwards and demand an explanation.

Instead, he opens the door slowly, and only wide enough to admit him. Steps inside. Closes it carefully before he turns around.

For a second, she wonders if there was ever a storm at all. If she hadn’t simply built him up, these last few months, into something he never was.

Or he’s just tired.

She sure is, despite the fact that she’s been sitting around this house doing nothing for three days now. If he was going to make her wait any longer, she might have read the quarto of _Doctor Faustus_ on the shelf in the bedroom, just for the poetry of it all.

“I’m glad you got my message.” She doesn’t bother standing up to greet him, instead staying at his table in a rickety chair. There’s no point in sitting in it as if it were the chair in her tavern: here, she lets herself slouch. She’s earned a slouch.

Flint knows who she is anyways.

There’s no one to impress, anymore.

“Is that what that was?” he’s still lurking near the door. There must be men outside. But probably not Silver. If Silver was here, he’d be here. Which begs the question: where is he? Did Flint come see her because it was the more important task, or the lesser?

“Silver always knows where I am. I simply assumed the location would get your attention. Please, sit.”

“This is my house,” Flint says, not sitting.

“Have it your way.” She drags a fingertip across the tabletop, where it’s worn and sanded smooth. Did Flint bring this table here for Miranda Barlow? Did he make it for her? Buy it in town, load it onto a cart? “I’m unarmed.”

He stomps past her, sticking his head into the bedroom.

“It’s empty!” she calls after him. “I’m alone.”

“Alright.” He returns, throwing himself into the chair across from her. That same old slump, like he’s trying to take up as much space as possible. If she squints, she can imagine him with more hair, sitting on her couch and telling her a story about a Spaniard named… what was his name? She can’t remember, now. “What do you want?”

“To live.”

He laughs. One quick thing, aborted nearly the second it comes out of his mouth.

“I’ve been thinking about loopholes,” she continues. _“I keep Nassau._ Vague term, as I’m learning. Technically, Woodes Rogers has Nassau. As does the Lord Proprietor. As does the King. Each of them passing off the responsibility. Why can’t I do the same?”

“You think a surrender is the same as control.”

“Not a surrender,” Eleanor says. “A trade.”

“And why would I agree to that?” he’s almost completely still, sizing her up with nothing more than a twitch in his eye. “I hold the fort. I hold the town. I hold the beach. You are here, on your own, with no allies, no ships, and a governor who has been chased off. Why should I cede ground to you?”

“Chased off where?” Eleanor leans forward. “You don’t know where he’s gone. I don’t know where he’s gone. But I know him. He isn’t the type to give up easily, to be scared off by a ghostly man and some guns. He’ll be back, and when he comes, he’s going to have more ships, more men— are you telling me you believe your men are going to fight him off? I managed this island for years. I know that it’s near impossible to make pirates pull together when there isn't a prize in sight. The longer you hold this island without a common enemy, the more your company will splinter, if it hasn’t already.” There. A tightening in his face. Just a little. She tries not to smile. “He’ll take back the island as easily as he took it in the first place.”

“And you think you can prevent him from returning?”

No. There are all sorts of things that can happen to a man at sea, of course, but Eleanor realizes with some level of horror that she doesn’t want anything to happen. She wants Woodes to be happy. She might even want Woodes to be happy with her.

“What I can do is surrender myself, and all of his remaining council and advisers. Hostages valuable enough to stall his attack and force him to negotiate.”

Flint shakes his head. “Woodes Rogers is a man who has been run out of a place he considers his by right. He has lost not one, not two, but three fights with an enemy he believes is inferior to him. I’m sure he’s angry. I’m sure he’s humiliated, desperate to make up for those losses. And you think he will negotiate?”

“I will make him.” He trusts her judgment, he trusts her decisions: he will at least hear her out. “I will convince him, and his allies, that Nassau is a lost cause. That to not ransom the men he can and return home would be a crime that their families would hold him to account for. He knows that if he returns to London, he will face debtors’ prison, but that the longer he stays the worst it will become.”

“You think you can do this?”

“I know I can.” She’s pretty sure she can. Perhaps they can get married and go to Philadelphia. She will put up with the cold, she will put up with her family’s scorn. She will make them respect her, and best yet, it won’t be _here_. “There is no downside, for you. If this doesn’t work, you kill me, and my hold over this place is forfeit. If it works, you keep the island without losing more of your men or facing down the gallows. Do we have a deal?”

Slowly, Flint nods.

Eleanor leans back against the chair, and it’s only now that she realizes how fast her heart was beating, how hard she’d pressed her palms into the table. Like she was trying to make an imprint on it. Leave some sign she was here, in case Flint just decided to shoot her and be done with it.

“You really think it’ll work?” he asks.

“I told you, I’ll make him—”

“Not Rogers. You’re convinced that handing me Nassau will satisfy your bargain?”

She doesn’t for a moment believe he’s asking out of concern on her behalf. “That bargain is currently satisfied with me commanding a group of about a dozen men, chased out of my fort and my town. If I see Silver again, I’m going to shoot him.”

“Do that and the deal is off.”

Ugh. “According to my men, a shot went through him and he didn’t even stumble.” She still hasn’t quite figured out how he managed to lose an entire leg, but she never worked up the nerve to ask. Didn’t much care, until now.

She still doesn’t know if it’s possible for him to die— but if he does, is she free?

“Shoot Silver and I’ll shoot you,” Flint says. “Threaten him the way you did yesterday, and I’ll shoot you.”

She raises her hands a little. “Fine. _Fine.”_

“Good.”

“They say you two are inseparable now. Some people say he’s pledged to your service, some say you to his, with blood magic or soul magic or whatever the fuck else.” Max had reported increasingly creative tales from drunken soldiers. Eleanor suspected that she reported this to hide the fact that she was not reporting other things. “But Silver says that isn’t true.”

Flint does that thing with his eye again. She wouldn’t notice if she wasn’t looking for it. “It’s not.”

“You really trust him? Surely you’re smarter than that.”

“He’s my friend,” Flint says, although that doesn’t really answer the question. The time when Flint would tell her about personal and personnel woes is long behind them.

“Friends,” she repeats.

“Surely you’re familiar with the concept.”

“I’ve had allies. I’ve had lovers.” She’d like a drink in her hand, for this. “I don’t think I’ve ever had _friends_.” Is Max her friend? She could be. She could have been. If Eleanor had made any effort towards that end, these last few months, instead of being suspicious of her every move.

But it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? What Max knew, what Max didn’t know, what Max didn’t tell her. From London or Philadelphia, this will all seem petty.

“Spare me your self-pity,” Flint says. “You sold your soul. Not for the welfare of Nassau, not for our common goals. You sold your soul for yourself, and yourself is what you got.”

“So you’re not angry that I did it, you’re angry that I didn’t do it in the way that was most convenient for you. You’re really something, has anyone ever told you that?”

He shrugs.

“And considering it was you who abandoned our common goals whenever it suited you, I’m sure you wouldn’t have been happy anyway,” she adds, feeling a temper coming on as sure as the winds. How dare he. How _dare_ he.

“Me? We wanted self-government. We wanted to be free of British rule, to make the New World more than an extension of the old. But how long did it take you to ally with them?”

“You weren’t there.” Something ugly and bitter is in her throat. “You weren’t there. The men you had convinced to fight laid down their arms almost immediately, and I salvaged the situation as best I could. Just like I did when Charles took the fort. Just like I did when you sailed to Charles Town for a pardon and burned it to the ground instead. Every time you came up with a plan, every time you _changed_ the plan, I supported you. But when I needed you, you weren’t there, and I could never know for sure if you were coming back. I had to make choices based on the options that presented themselves, and I won’t apologize for it.”

Flint stands. She tenses, ready to move, ready to run or hit or yell, but he goes to the cabinets instead, opening and closing each in turn. If he’s looking for his food, Eleanor is going to have to tell him that she’s been eating it.

“Fucking Billy,” he mutters, but he finds a bottle of something. It takes him a minute to work out the cork, and he makes more of a face than she’s seen from him all afternoon.

He takes a long drink before he sits back down at the table, plonking the bottle between them.

When he fails to drop dead from poison, Eleanor grabs it.

Whatever it is is disgusting, but she appreciates it anyway. He still hasn’t apologized, but she can feel the anger draining away despite herself. She’s just so damn tired.

“How did we get here?” she asks.

He shrugs again. “I met a man who wanted to change the world.”

“Yeah.” She takes another drink. “So did I.”

 

xxxi.

“It’s dangerous,” Silver says.

“I know.”

“She’s got an ulterior motive.”

“Obviously.”

“And yet it is likely the safest way forward,” Madi adds.

“Agreed.”

“Jesus!” For all that Eleanor doesn’t feel it, Silver thinks he may have done his job a bit too well. Nassau is theirs, and still they are wringing their hands about Eleanor Guthrie. Even now, she has a hold on them.

Of course she does. This is what he promised her. Silver can still see bits of her soul, glinting about town.

“However,” Madi continues, “it is an obvious vulnerability. She might sail to London, but that will not prevent her from returning. We might never have a chance to—” she stops. Looks out around the courtyard for a minute, as though checking to see if anyone is listening. “We might never have an opportunity like this again.”

“I know.” Flint runs a hand over his beard, in that way he does when he’s already decided something but wants people to think he’s still considering their opinions.

“You’ve already told her we’ll take the deal.” Flint says nothing, and Silver wants to shake him. “You set this into motion before you walked back up the hill.”

“If I had hesitated, she could have left. Right now, I know where she is, and she isn’t working on a plan to slip past the guards I left.”

“If she’d left, I would have found her. You just don’t want to kill her.” The man who hasn’t hesitated to kill nearly anyone along the way, up to and including himself. “Neither of you want to kill her.” Is that because of Silver? Or is it Flint and Madi’s relationship to their own tumultuous pasts? “She gets Nassau for the rest of her life. I promised her that. As long as she lives, she will be a threat to what you want to build here.”

The other two look at each other.

“What?” Silver snaps.

“Normally, you would be arguing my side, and I yours,” Flint says.

Yes. So Flint should agree with him. “I don’t _want_ to kill her. I’m just—”

“Hungry?” Madi asks quietly.

Silver goes still.

He is. But that isn’t the issue here. He’s never had to kill one of his contracts: they’ve always managed to die perfectly well on their own.

“No.” It’s not quite the truth, but it’s the closest thing he can get. Because they will never be able to truly understand— and he pushes that thought to the back of his mind, because it is neither wanted nor helpful. “I am trying to protect you. You have your histories, and you may be influenced by what I did to keep her in power, but we all know that she can’t be trusted.”

“She can be trusted to look after her own interests,” Flint says. “And this is definitely in her own interests.”

“And you’ve already decided.” Silver doesn’t fling his hands in the air, but only because he’s still leaning on his crutch. Madi is standing at Flint’s side, and the gesture isn’t lost on him. “I am clearly outvoted. But in case she’s considering doing harm to either of you, please remind her that I will always know where to find her.”

 

 

xxxii.

The fort has a lovely view of the sunset.

It’s easy to see, in this light, why Nassau is worth fighting for. The golden light on the town, the pink of the sky, the black silhouettes of the trees. It’s so far from Scotland, far from England, far from places Silver can barely remember but leave a bitter thread behind nonetheless.

Benjamin always loved a nice sunset. He’d wished he could be a painter, and capture something so fleeting in permanent color. But they’d always made John Silver sad— they just reminded him of another day far from home.

“Are you planning to become a gunner?” Madi asks, stepping up next to him.

“I’m not sure if I have the speed.” Logan did, though— perhaps Silver could do it if he tried not to think about it. “The longer we stay in this fort, the more I find myself watching the water to make sure no one is coming. It makes me understand how a man left in a castle can be driven mad.” It certainly explains a lot about Hornigold.

“Perhaps you need to get out of here,” she says.

“What did you have in mind?”

“Julius. He is leading an army of slaves around the island, hating both the plantation owners and the pirates. I tried to make what amends I could, but I don’t think it would hurt to have you speak to him as well. Show them that we are serious about this alliance. About making amends.”

“And how do you propose we make amends?”

She looks at him, and Silver turns back to the sea. “Oh.”

“I know he is your friend—”

“Don’t.” Billy tried to kill Flint and Madi. Silver doesn’t know what that makes him, anymore.  “Julius. You have a way to introduce us?”

“I can make contact with Ruth,” she says. “But as for me— I think it might be best if I go see to the prisoners. They might have knowledge that is useful, and Flint might need someone more suspicious of Eleanor’s intentions.”

Silver tries not to smile. “If I’d known that all it would take would be my getting captured to make the two of you get along, I’d have tried it months ago. Should I be worried about the amount of time you’re spending together?”

“Worried on whose behalf?” she says it like she’s teasing, but frowns when Silver doesn’t respond. “I am only joking. Although Kofi tells me Joji thinks you and I got married in secret.”

Of all the people to be spreading rumors, Silver isn’t sure how it could possibly be Joji. Hand gestures were probably involved. But Joji used to jerk off on the figurehead of the ship that Rogers is now sailing, so Silver doesn’t think anyone should take his opinion seriously.

“I could tell them to stop.”

“I do not care what the men say,” Madi says. “I don’t need rumor to keep them respectful towards me, but it’s not as though it’s a harmful one. At least not now.”

Silver wonders if Flint believes it. “I’ll go to the Underhill plantation in the morning and see about arranging a meeting.” The sun dips below the sea, and the world turns into soft shadows. “Be careful out there.”

 

 

xxxiii.

Silver runs into Morgan on the path down from the fort.

He has too many men with him for a full conversation, but they don’t need to have one: he tilts his head a little, and Morgan nods.

“He’s there.”

And it doesn’t really matter what rumors Flint believes now, does it?

The choice ahead sits heavy on Silver’s shoulders.

 

 

xxxiv.

When they said Madi was leading an army, Eleanor had still half imagined her as a little girl. A teenager. But she hadn’t been that much younger than Eleanor herself, so of course she is fully grown. Staring at Eleanor with an expression she can no longer read.

 _I’m so glad you’re not dead,_ Eleanor wants to say, and doesn’t even hate herself for thinking it. If someone else has to have Nassau, Madi isn’t the worst option.

As soon as Woodes comes back, none of this will matter anymore.

She’s not sure who she’ll be, after that, but she’s willing to find out.

The sound of bells is just audible from the town. 

 

 

xxxv.

“A thousand Spanish fighters are more than three times the number our forces could withstand,” Ben says.

But they can’t run.

Julius walks off, and all Silver can see in his soul is a lifetime of pain held together by a rigid determination. It doesn’t answer the question of whether he’ll be back, but they don’t have any other options now.

He draws his sword and looks to the cane fields.

 

 

xxxvi.

Men in gray uniforms walk down the road, and Eleanor is a child, running as fast as she can, covered in her mother’s blood, and she is screaming and screaming—

But she’s not, she’s silent as the grave as they hide under the brush.

Madi says, “It looks like your governor found his reinforcements." 

 

 

xxxvii.

The governor’s people are cowering with a pastor that Flint is fairly certain is the same one Miranda had fucked.

“What are they doing here?” Fraiser asks, with a lot of guts for a man currently hiding under a table.

Eleanor ignores him, looking over the group. “Where is Max?”

“What have you done—”

“The Spanish are here. There isn’t going to be a safe place on this island, and you sorry lot had _one_ job, and that was to stay together and hidden. So let me ask you again: where the _fuck_ is Max?”

“She went looking for you,” the maid says, hands twisted together. “When we heard that the Spanish had arrived. She went looking for you.”

Eleanor takes a few steps backwards, fists clenched. Seeming very upset for a woman who just a few days ago had told Flint that she didn’t have any friends, but whatever she’s feeling, she seems to stomp it down. Which is good. When Eleanor panics, she tends to do things like sell her soul.

Flint is not panicking.

Silver couldn’t possibly have had time to get back to the fort by now. But maybe Rogers will want to focus his effort on taking it back, not on finding pirates and renegade slaves holed up in the interior.

Maybe.

He looks at Madi, then back to Eleanor. Who is also looking at Madi.

“You said that you think the Spanish are here with the governor. Why?”

“Who else could it be?”

“The harbor is still obstructed,” Flint points out. “Yet it sounds like they landed without a problem.” Landed, fired on his town, burning his town.

“My plan could still work. I’ll just find him, convince him to agree to our terms.”

Madi moves to the window, peeking through the shutters. “He won’t be able to stop them. Not anymore. They’re too far inland. Have too many scores to settle. They are not dogs he can call back to him. You know this, Eleanor. You have seen this before.”

 

 

xxxviii.

They come from the field, nothing but horses and guns and blades. They don’t care for ghost stories. They won’t stop long enough to see one.

Silver shoots and he stabs and he hurries his men into the barn.

Then Julius arrives, and he sends them back out again.

The Spanish fall, and something within Silver is pulling him away.

Somewhere, Eleanor is dying.

 

 

xxxix.

_I get Nassau._

But she’s not in Nassau. She’s in the interior, with a group of craven men who have fled to the barn with two soldiers and a Bible to protect them.

Flint, Madi, and three of their men are what they have left.

She gets Nassau for the rest of her life.

“This was never going to work,” she says aloud.

“What are you talking about?” Madi asks.

She can’t live without it. She’s buried herself in the ground here, lined the buildings and beaches with her soul. And now the town is dying, and she has no way out.

She should never have left. 

“When they come in, go out the back. Get Mrs. Hudson to safety, if you can, but feel free to use the rest of the men as a distraction.” If she’s going down, she’s taking a civilized Nassau with her.

And as many of the Spanish as she can.

It’s not a kind thought. It’s not a caring thought. 

But it doesn’t matter what she is, anymore, because she won’t be it for long.

In the fireplace, flames crackle.

 

 

xl.

Eleanor is with Flint and Madi. Eleanor is dying. Silver can feel Flint, there in his arm, but he doesn't know what that means. Would he know if Flint was dying, too? Surely he would know if Flint was dead.

He wouldn’t know about Madi at all.

He urges his stolen Spanish horse to go faster, becoming as weightless as he dares. He can’t come apart now.

Because if he finds three bodies, he’ll have to be here to burn both England and Spain to the ground. 

 

 

xli.

Flint, Kweku and two redcoats kill the five Spanish soldiers that try to storm the barn.

Eleanor crawls out of a burning house, bleeding from the head.

Flint holds her until she starts to go stiff, and then he places her head down in the grass, gentle as he can. The heat of the burning house makes sweat break out on his back, on his neck, but he can’t bring himself to move.

Madi joins him, and together, they wait for Silver.

 

 

xlii.

He arrives on a horse far too big for him, eyes dark and wild. His dismount isn’t graceful— he’s swinging towards them on his crutch faster than is safe, ignoring or not feeling the heat.

“I thought,” he says, and before Flint knows what’s happened Silver’s arms are around him. “I thought,” Silver says again. “But I should have known better.”

Flint wants to hold him here. Wants to keep him from Eleanor, from becoming someone else— but he can’t ask that, can’t say that. Change is what Silver is, sure as the moon, sure as the tides.

He tries not to feel like he’s lost something when Silver pulls away, grasping Madi’s arm.

Then, at last, Eleanor.

Silver wobbles on the crutch as he kneels.

 

 

xliii.

— _This island is no place for a little girl—_

_Blood and screaming and a town on fire, the sand under her feet as she runs, screaming, Mama, MAMA—_

_—Charles Vane, years younger, standing at Teach_ ' _s side, but his eyes are on her—_

 _—Why not now? Your father is done, but I can get money. Rackham doesn_ ' _t know how to manage the inn, and Silver owes me a favor. We can leave here. Start over. I love you—_

_—I think you'_ _re just tired of fathers, telling you what to do—_

— _The pistol misfires, and she_ _’s on the ground, the log from the fireplace is burning her palm but she’s bashing the soldier over the head—_

 

xliv.

The maid sits next to a pile of bodies. There is blood on her dress, and her eyes are fixed directly ahead. 

Her name is Mrs. Hudson, and Silver realizes he cares what happens to her.

“Are you alright?” he asks. “Did they hurt you?”

She shakes her head the smallest bit.

“Can you walk?”

A nod.

“Can you ride?”

Another nod.

“You can either come with us, or you can go back into town.” If there is any town left. If there is anything left, here. The fort would not have withstood twelve warships, not with the men who were in it.

Hopefully most of the men have already gotten to Featherstone and the _Walrus_. Hopefully they won’t leave without Flint, Silver and Madi.

“I just want to go home,” Mrs. Hudson says, and Silver sighs.

“You can have the horse.”

They don’t have time to bury the others, but Flint stops to close the pastor’s eyes.

“Friend of yours?” Silver asks, and Flint shakes his head.

 

 

xvl.

Rackham is alive. He’s picked up Max somewhere along the way, and then they split off.

But there are more allies waiting on the island.

“That’s more than Morgan had in Panama,” Flint says, and the world is opening up in front of him.

 

 

xvli.

In the camp, some of the men have started to sing. Whether it’s a lament to those lost in the last few days, or a celebration of their own survival, their own potential, Silver can’t tell. Their voices run together like souls in a crowd.

_“I looked up and saw the sun was overcome with crystal sky…”_

He can see Flint among them. Not singing, not even drinking. He sits with Madi, the Maroon Queen, and one of the chiefs that has come from Hispaniola. They look like they're making plans, and Silver realizes he is afraid. 

“I have heard stories about you,” Julius says, sitting down next to him. “The demon who wears the face of a white man.”

“There are lots of stories about me. Some of them are even true.”

“I have heard that you do not need to eat. Do not need to sleep. Do not need to breathe. That you can change your face and walk through walls. I have heard that bullets pass through you. That death can’t touch you. Back on New Providence, you asked me to be your partner in a war, but how can I trust that? How can a man who does not fear death, nor hunger, nor the passage of time, understand what he is asking of his men?”

_“And now I must this world forsake, another man my place must take.”_

“I do fear death.” Silver keeps his voice low, under the sound of the music. “Not my own, perhaps, but I fear the deaths of those I care for. I fear the passage of time, and what it might take from me. And I see what I ask of my men. I see it in their faces. I see it in their hearts.”

“Then how can you ask it?” Julius gestures to the gathering in front of them. The island around them. “If you can see into their hearts, if you can see their spirits, you can see how unwilling they are to move. You know we cannot change the world. Not like this, not all at once. Can you not keep them safe here? Keep a part of the world from crashing down, before what happened in Nassau happens here? Because it will. And all will be lost.”

“I can see their hearts, but I cannot change them. I can’t protect them.” That half hour when he hadn’t known if Flint and Madi lived— that fear, that anger. That has been guiding Flint for a decade. “Not unless they want to be protected.”

“Then don’t protect the people,” Julius says. “Protect the place.”

 

 

xlvii.

A ship has been sighted.

It could be friends. What friends they have left, Flint would be hard pressed to come up with, and yet he can’t imagine Woodes Rogers attacking with one ship. Not after he failed to take the island with a whole fleet.

Still, they prepare. There are new alliances to test, their numbers are greater than before— they have said things like _Port Royal_ and _Campeche_ and _Boston_ , and the world is alive with possibilities.

This is the type of hopeful feeling Flint usually gets moments before it’s all torn away.

Is this ship the one to do it?

Silver had given him a long look before Flint had left for the beach, and for the first time in a long time, Flint hadn’t been sure what he meant. He’s changed, since Eleanor. Flint knew it would happen, and he loves him the same, but he will have to get used to it. Adjust for it.

They’ll have time later.

Now he waits in the brush, a hundred men at his back, a gun in his hand-

And Jack Rackham steps onto the shore.

 

 

xlviii.

Everyone is acting weird, these days.

Flint and Madi, with their grand plans.

The men, some of whom are bowing to Silver when he walks past.

And Rackham, waving off a story about a rejected business deal.

The good part about not sleeping is that Silver has time to figure it out. Means he can lurk on their makeshift street of makeshift huts, watching as Rackham tries to sneak through the dark.

“Going for a walk?” Silver asks, and Rackham startles so badly he nearly falls over.

“Silver! Hello. Didn’t see you there.” His attempt at recovery is admirable— or would be, if he wasn’t trying to hide a sword behind his back. “Dangerous world, these days.”

“Not here, surely. Not surrounded by allies.”

“Well, they know you better than me.” Rackham makes a sound like he’s cleared his throat, and he might be trying to smile, but Silver only looks at his soul. His terrified, guilty, determined soul.

He hasn’t spent much time with the man, but what he does know is that, despite all appearances, he isn’t an idiot. And he isn’t a coward.

“So are you and I just going to stand here and pretend that you’ve told us the full story of your trip to Philadelphia?” Silver asks. “Or are you going to tell me what the hell you’re doing?”

Rackham looks around. “It depends. Are we going to pretend that you’re prepared to sack Boston? Or can we go inside and talk?”

 

 

xlix.

“The Guthries have agreed to buy Nassau,” Silver repeats. “Eleanor dies, but her shit family gets to swoop in and take everything she built?” Rackham does something with his eyebrows that might be a look of concern, and Silver raises a hand. “Apologies. Ignore that. She’s still—settling.”

“Right.” Rackham leans away from him a bit. “Well, it wouldn’t actually be the Guthries running the place. They would choose a new governor— Featherstone— who would understand that he is answering to Max.”

“Max.”

“She’s won over Eleanor’s grandmother quite thoroughly.”

Silver is sure that she has. “And they sent you back to make sure that the pirate problem was taken care of.” Horror is growing in his chest, and this time, it’s all his own. “You came back to kill Flint.”

Rackham doesn’t answer, but his eyes go to his sword.

Silver reaches for his own. “And you think I would let that happen?”

“He’s going to die anyway!” Jack hisses. “He’s going to die, just like Eleanor, just like Charles, like Anne almost did— a dozen Spanish ships destroyed almost everything. In one afternoon.  Can you imagine what’s going to happen when the British aren’t distracted by a war and decide to do something about us? They’ll grind us under their heels, they’ll hang Flint in Port Royal and thousands of people will line up to spit at him— and not just him, but Madi— her mother— me—”

Not if Silver kills him first. “If we do it your way, yours is the only life you’d save! We’ve exposed Maroon Island. Hundreds of British sailors know where it is. Do you imagine they’ll just forget?”

“Yes.”

It’s not Jack who spoke.

Julius steps in from the porch, eyes bright in the lantern light. “You told me that you can’t change the hearts of men,” Julius says. “But you can guide circumstances on an island. You’ve done it before.”

They keep talking.

And Silver, he knows that everyone dies, in the end.

Everyone dies, and everyone is forgotten.

The hundreds of men that have followed him, that have whispered his name. Men that Silver has sailed with, fought with, fought beside. Madi, who has years, and so many people left to help—

And Flint.

 

 

l.

It truly is a beautiful view, from the cliffs.

The ocean, calm at a distance but angry against the rocks.

The unreachable horizon.

The memories. Flint, smiling at him in the sun, his hand on Silver’s shoulder—

Silver realizes what had truly happened in that moment at the same time that he feels Flint approaching. He doesn’t know what to do with this newfound knowledge. Not now, when it can’t matter.

But he’ll hold it close all the same.

It’s odd, to feel a hurt like this. Silver has so rarely wanted anything: if it always feels like this, it’s no wonder that so many human stories are tragedies.

“You wanted to talk to me?” Flint asks.

Silver stands, leaning hard on his crutch. “I did.”

“Was the conversation going to be about the armed men lurking below us?”

Idiots. “They were supposed to stay out of sight.”

“I gathered. I assume they tried their best.”

“And you came up here anyway.”

Flint shrugs. “I think I could take them. Am I going to have to?”

He’s still just as bright as he was that day on the _Walrus_ , logbook in hand. “The first time I saw your soul,” Silver says, “I wanted to look away, and I wanted to look at nothing else for the rest of my life. Everyone is unique, to some extent, but _you_ — you stood out from them all. You always did. That’s why I followed you, that’s why I saved your life. That’s why I was determined to get a claim on your soul before you died.”

For a second, Flint looks like he’s about to say something. His mouth is halfway open, his throat is moving— but whatever words he has don’t make it out.

“I’ve told you that I don’t like killing. But I have chosen it, over and over, as a better option than watching you die. I have killed so _many_ men to prevent you from dying, and I know that one day, it won’t be enough. Because there is no end to this. If we retake Nassau and kill the governor, if we sail for the colonies, they will stop us. It will be the Spanish raid, over and over again. And again, we will be forced to sacrifice lives and loves and souls in a grand game. For an outcome that none of you will live to see. That’s not a war. That is Hell.”

Oh, his shoulder aches. He shouldn’t be able to feel this.

“So this is it?” Flint asks. “You’re walking away? Is this Eleanor talking?”

What Eleanor wanted, in the end, was peace, and a chance to live with someone she loved. Silver isn't going to get that either. “I am not walking away. You are." 

He knows what Flint is feeling, but the only sign of it is the wrinkle in his brow. “And how do you plan to make me do that?”

“Thomas Hamilton is alive.” The words have been sitting on the back of his tongue for well over a week, now, but saying them does not make him feel better. “At a plantation in Savannah. And I am sending you to him.” Silver grabs Flint’s shoulder as he tries to move away. “I am not lying to you. And I will wait here with you— for an hour, a day, a year— until you find a way to accept it. You know that I can.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care.”

Flint tries to move again, and Silver holds on tighter, because he doesn’t truly know what he will do if Flint walks down that hill, if he pulls a sword on Ben, on _Silver—_

“If you do this, we will have been for nothing.” Flint says it like nothing is the worst thing one could be, and perhaps he's right. Isn't that what Silver fears, every time he lest go of himself? “Defined by their histories, twisted into their narratives until all that is left of us are the monsters in the stories they tell their children.”

“I have always been one of those monsters,” Silver says. His hand feels like it’s burning. “And it doesn’t matter. I’ve lived for thousands of years, I’m sure of it. But I don’t know where I come from, I don’t know if I had a mother or father. I don’t know if I was born with dark skin or light skin or no skin at all. All I know, for certain, is that in a hundred years, you will be dead. Someday, your bones will fall apart to nothing. The sea will wear away the cliffs. England will crumble, and another empire will rise. Perhaps better, perhaps worse. Until one day, that empire will fall as well. As will the one after that, and the one after that.”

“Are you telling me that nothing we do will ever matter?”

“Of course it matters.” The rocks, the sea, the sky, the wind— Silver will piece together his memories of them, later. Hold this moment in his mind for as long as he can. “This here is all you’re ever going to get. And I refuse to stand by and let you lose it, let Madi lose it, all in the name of a sad story you’ll never get to read.”

“Don’t do this,” Flint says, quiet enough that Silver wouldn’t be able to hear him if he wasn’t standing so close. When he moves, their foreheads rest against each other. “You can have my soul, you can have everything, just— don’t do this.”

He’d once wanted it so much. “No.” Silver presses his lips to Flint’s cheek. “No. I am going to send you back to him. Whole. You can imagine that into a story, if you’d like.”

What kind of story is it? A war story? A tragedy? It’s certainly not a love story, because what role would Silver play in that? He’s not the spurned lover, because he has Flint’s love, burning on his arm. He isn’t sure he deserves it, and he can’t say he loves Flint more than Hamilton does, because he doesn’t know how to quantify such a thing.

All he can do is give Flint everything Flint hasn’t admitted to himself that he wants.

And it won’t cost anyone their souls.

“I don’t believe you,” Flint says again, and Silver nods.

“That’s alright,” he says. “I only need you to trust me.”

 

 

li.

“You aren’t staying,” Madi says, though it’s phrased as neither an order nor a question.

Silver had seen her ship return from Nassau, but he hadn’t left the cliffs to go meet her. He doesn’t ask how the trip went. She’s here, she’s alive, and that means that she and Rackham were successful in apprehending Woodes Rogers.

He hopes she spat in his face.

“Do you want me to?”

“What I want seems to not be a matter of any relevance.”

Yes, he’s earned that. Earned the hard edge to her voice, to her eyes. And yet she’s here, meeting him on the cliffs. She’s asking.

“I can’t stay,” Silver agrees. “I’ll need to eat. I can’t imagine you want me to only do that here.”

She nods, turning out to the water.

 _Nassau, thereabouts,_ he heard Flint say, and Silver tries not to think about it. Tries to remember instead Flint in the distance, wrapped in Thomas Hamilton’s embrace. 

Despite all the water between them, Silver can still feel him. He presses his palm against his arm, though he’s not sure if it’s to protect the feeling or to try and chase it away. 

“But you’ll be back, eventually. For Julius.”

Eventually. “I could be back earlier, for you,” Silver says. “If you’d like. You don’t have to decide now.”

“I won’t always be here. All we have suffered, all we have lost— and all we have done is build the wall around ourselves even higher.”

“Not for everyone.” He and Julius had been very specific. “Not for you.”

“I know. And that is why I must go. Eme is still in place in Nassau, but she deserves a chance to be among her people. Someone else will need to be able to travel back and forth, to manage our arrangement with Max.”

“You want to go farther than that,” Silver guesses.

“I do.” She turns her hands into her armpits, her only acknowledgment of how the wind has started to grow cooler. “I will. If I cannot free the world, I must protect as much of it is possible until someone else does.”

And she'll have all the money in the ground to do it. “Please be careful.”

She doesn’t dignify that with a response. “Will you go to Savannah?”

If Flint remains there. Silver had looked at the walls of the plantation, at the guards. He’ll have no problem walking out of there, when he chooses to. But that’s not what Madi is asking.

“Eventually. But I’m going to assume that he wants space from me right now.”

“Yes,” she says, somewhere beyond anger but not quite furious. “I know how he feels.”

But still, she stands with him on the cliff.

Together, they watch the sun go down.


	6. Epilogue

The house could have been one on Nassau: so close to the sea that the salt has seeped into the wood of the walls and the blood of the patrons, a man with a hurdy gurdy stumbling through the verses of _The Ages of Man,_ and alcohol of dubious provenance.

But most of the men here are older than they would have lived to be, back on New Providence. And the sunlight hits differently.

 _“Now you must see within the glass the whole estate of mortal man,"_  the musician sings. Silver gives him a coin out of habit, bypassing the bar and making for the hallway behind it.

“Where you going?” the bartender asks him.

“One of my friends is renting a room,” Silver guesses. He’s in there, whether or not he’s renting. “He’s not doing well.”

“Oh, that one. His brother-in-law went out looking for a doctor. No offense, mate, but he should be finding a priest.”

Silver presses his lips together, but he can’t bring himself to say anything. His wooden foot makes the boards under him groan, as though they’re considering sending him through to the cellar.

The door to the farthest room creaks when he opens it, and the man in the bed turns his head just a little to watch.

“I liked the last face better,” Flint says.

This time, Silver does smile. Flint recognizes him in every new face, and he never likes them at first. “Good to see you too, Captain.”

“You… took your time. Thought you’d… forgotten.”

What has it been— four years? Five? Flint and Thomas been renting a house a little farther from civilization, last time Silver had seen them, and Flint had been far more robust. “It’ll take me much longer than that to forget you,” he says, trying to sound casual. Like this is just another time he’ll stop by, for a few days or a few months, before going off to new territories, confident in his ability to find Flint again later.  “I’ve just been busy. This so-called Great Awakening hasn’t done me any favors, so I went to visit Madi for a bit, and then Billy Bones turned up in Bristol, and I had to deal with that. Let’s just say he won’t ever trust a one-footed man again, no matter what that man looks like.”

“Hope you… punched him,” Flint says.

“Well, he’s an old man, now. And I don’t punch old men.”

“He’s… at least… ten years younger than me.”

Silver crouches down by the bed, and Flint reaches out with a shaking hand to grab his arm. The faint bits of his soul that he’d left there grow warm in greeting.

He’d never meant to give them. Never known he was doing it. Silver doesn’t know if everyone shares their souls with the people they love, or if was because of Silver, or if was because of Flint. Flint’s love has always been a powerful thing.

It’s easy for Silver to understand how it started a war.

He’d expected it to fade, after he sent Flint to the plantation. Expected to stop one day and realize that he could no longer feel Flint’s presence in the world, not because he’d died but because he’d taken himself back— and yet he never did.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this,” he says, “but you’re an old man, too.”

“I suppose I am.” It’s more wheeze than words. “I sent… Thomas out. Will you… make sure he… stays away from trouble?”

Even as old as Thomas is, Silver isn’t sure there’s any man up for the task. There’s a reason the two have been moving up and down the colonies for the past few decades. “How about I get him _out_ of trouble?”

Flint nods, and the gesture seems to pain him. “It’s a deal.”

“Good.” Silver holds Flint’s hand in both of his, and watches his chest rise and fall. Looks past him to his soul, warmer than it used to be but still just as sharp, just as glorious. It doesn’t show signs of age like the body does. Like this, Silver can imagine they’re back in one of Flint and Thomas’s previous houses, or back on Maroon Island with Madi, or even in Nassau, the two of them against the rest of the world—

“Take it,” Flint says.

Silver looks back to his body. His face. “What?”

“Take it. Please. It was… yours anyway.”

 _If I had a heart or soul to offer you, I would,_ Silver wants to say— but then, Flint is dying. There’s no reason he can’t tell him. So he leans forward and kisses Flint, like they’re still pirates on the edge of a new world. Feels the warmth and the brightness and everything he told himself he'd never have. Flint presses one thin hand against the side of Silver’s face, holding him there.

Letting go.

Silver doesn’t need to coax his soul out. Doesn't need to split it into pieces. 

It comes to him as one, bright and alive and _Flint-James-McGraw-Barlow_ — he is standing in Nassau, he’s pacing the warship, he’s in Eleanor’s office, he’s falling in love with Silver on the cliffs, he’s a young boy up to his knees in the sea while a woman yells at him to come back, he’s embracing Thomas on the plantation, he’s making love to Thomas in a small house near a river, he’s seeing Silver come into his room, a welcome sight— he’s a thousand moments and passions and he stays on the floor, bowed under the weight of it all.

 _How many men have tried to kill you, only for you to die in bed of old age?_  he thinks. Flint can’t quite react to be amused, but— he would have been. He _was_.

Silver can feel him, right where his heart would be.

 

 

 

 

 

  
_And, when their glass is finally run,_   
_They must leave off where they first begun._

 

 

 

 

 

19—

Madeline Lucas lingers outside the theater.

“Can I bum a smoke?” she asks, and the woman next to her nods, pulling a box out of her pocket. 

Madeline loves cigarettes. They allow her to linger in places she otherwise couldn’t, to start conversations without anyone thinking it’s out of the ordinary. And every time she lights one, it’s like a little joke with herself.

“Seen it yet?” the woman asks. She’s wearing a uniform, and a name tag that says _Georgia._

“Hmm?”

Georgia points to the poster, crookedly displayed in the theater window. _Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island!_ Underneath the words is a color image of a winking man and a blond boy with a passing resemblance to Caroline Walter’s favorite china doll.

“No, I haven’t seen it.” Madeline has never liked the pictures much— people walking and talking with no soul in sight unsettles her more than anything else. “What’s it about?”

“ _Treasure Island?_ It’s a book for boys. You never heard of it?”

“Not as I can recall.” She's been a man, but never a boy. 

“Supposedly, a pirate captain buried some treasure on an island out in the Caribbean. Captain... Fire, or Flint, or something like that. The book is about a boy who goes to find it, but Long John Silver shows up. I don’t know. My brother was obsessed when we were kids, but I never cared about pirates much.”

Captain Flint. The name sounds like it should taste like salt, but she isn't sure why. 

“Huh.” Madeline shrugs at the poster, and redirects the conversation to what Georgia would do if she won the lottery. By next week, she'll have offered to make it happen. 

A few hours later she finds herself in a bookstore, counting out pennies while the man rummages through the shelves in search of the title.

“Is this a present?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “It’s just something I feel like I should read.”

She doesn’t end up liking the book at all, but she carries it around with her for decades.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ("Find herself at a bookstore" was a pun and I'm not sorry.) 
> 
> The full lyrics to The Ages of Man are [here](http://contemplator.com/england/ageman.html)
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](https://runawaymarbles.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Thank you all for following me on this 40,000 word crisis about the ephemeral nature of memory and the self <3 comments are, as always, loved and cherished


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